Tips for class presentation
- You should consider your talk to be a 1.5 hour tutorial to advanced ML students, rather than a research talk where you're just presenting the results of one or two papers. You should thus spend considerable time introducing the background ideas from scratch. Note that many of the core background ideas will be tersely stated in the research papers themselves, so you will likely have to do additional reading beyond the papers you'll be presenting.
- Avoid covering too many topics at a very cursory level. It's better to focus on less new material, e.g., a subset of the results in the papers you're presenting, but to present them thoroughly / clearly.
- Separate high-level ideas from the details. Both are important, but it’s much better to first emphasize high-level ideas before diving into details.
- Understanding material and effectively presenting material are VERY different tasks. A common mistake is to spend a lot of time reading / understanding papers, but to devote very little time planning how to effectively present the material. This leads to a bad presentation.
- When presenting theory, do NOT simply copy-paste theorems from a paper.
It's better to present simplified theorems that convey the high-level result w/o getting bogged down in details. It may also be easier to present theoretical results on the whiteboard, rather than using slides.
- Be judicious with how much math you put on slides. Moreover, be sure to adequately discuss all equations you include and carefully define all variables that appear on the slides.
- Slide animations can improve your presentation, especially when there is a lot of content on a single slide.
Animations effectively break one dense slide into several more manageable slides, and force you to present the material incrementally in a ‘bite-sized’ fashion.
- Think about questions to ask your classmates during your presentation. It will slow down your presentation, thus providing the audience more time to digest material. It also provides opportunities for discussion.