Advances in Distributed Systems
ECE 1746, Fall 2004
University of Toronto
Course home page
Presentation Format
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 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.
If you use slides, please use at least
20-24 point font
for text. For a 15 minute presentation, do not use more than 15-20 slides
or else the presentation will appear rushed. Also, please make sure
that you
have numbered your slides. You are welcome to
send slides to the instructor a few days before the presentation to get
additional help.
After the presentation the student is expected to lead a 20-30 minute
in-depth discussion of the paper (the length of the discussion will
depend on the number of students in the class). 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
have the answers at
the end of the slides.
The answers to these questions should not be obvious, i.e. they should
not be stated clearly in the paper. Instead, the questions should help
in critial analysis of the paper. For example, suppose one of the
stated contributions of the paper is that it "Enables secure
peer-to-peer routing". One question might be: how secure is the routing
and what strategy discussed in the paper makes it secure?