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Presentation Format
Each presentation should be sent by email to the instructor before the day of the presentation and it should be in PDF format. Please make sure that the slides of the presentation are numbered. Please use at least 24 point font for text on slides. For a 15-20 minute presentation, do not use more than 20 slides or else the presentation will appear rushed. You are welcome to send slides to the instructor a few days before the presentation to get additional help.
While students are welcome to present papers as they wish, here is an outline of a presentation that should help you get started.
- Start by stating the thesis or the goals of the paper, i.e., what you think the paper is trying to achieve.
- Next, state the major contributions of the work, i.e., what you think is new about the work.
- Briefly describe each contribution. Choose one (or two) contribution(s) that you think is most interesting or novel and explain it in some detail.
- If there are experiments in the paper that highlight the benefits of the work, present some of these results. Ideally, the results you show will focus on the contributions that you explained in detail.
- Next, present some of the related work in the area, i.e., how is this work related to other projects or systems.
- Present your conclusions about the work, i.e., does the paper achieve what you think it set out to achieve.
- Please remember that you are not trying to present the entire
contents of the paper but what is interesting and novel research.
After the presentation the student is expected to lead a 20-30 minute in-depth discussion of the paper. This discussion should aim to answer the following questions:
- What were the main contributions of the work?
- What were the advantages and disadvantages of the approach?
- How does it compare to other work that has been discussed in class?
- What are potential avenues for further work and improvements?
To aid in this discussion, each student presentation must end with a list of 5 specific questions that the student can ask other students and should be prepared to answer. The student must also have the answers for each of the questions at the end of the slides. Organize the questions and answers in separate slides. For example, if slide 18 is your last slide, then slide 19 should have the first question, slide 20 should have the answer to the first question, slide 21 should have the second question, etc.
These questions should be of a critical nature and should help in analyzing the paper, i.e., questions with obvious answers are generally not interesting for discussion. For example, suppose one of the stated contributions of the paper is that it "enables recovery from software bugs". One question might be: what types of software bugs and failures are handled, and what might be the limitations of the approach?