CPE/CSC 480-F09 Artificial Intelligence Presentation Hints

For those of you who don't have much experience giving presentations, here are a few pointers.

Preparation

Especially if you are unsure about your topic, it is better to start working on it as early as possible, and discuss it with me if you have doubts. Of course you can wait until the day before the due date, and then pull an allnighter, but this strategy may be a little risky.

Structure

There are many ways of arranging the information to be conveyed in a presentation, and you can use your own experience and judgement for it. A relatively "safe" way of doing it is to use a structure similar to my lectures:

1. Overview: Introduce the main parts of the presentation.
2. Introduction: Describe why this problem is important (or at least interesting), and how it relates to the general topic of the class. If necessary, give some background information on issues the audience may not be familiar with.
3. Description of the System, Concept, or Method: This is the technical part of the presentation, where you discuss the design of the system, or the main ideas of the concept or method.
4. Implementation: What are the tools and techniques used for the implementation, and which problems needed to be overcome.
5. Experimentation and Evaluation: What experiments were performed to demonstrate that the system works, and how was its performance evaluated.
6. Conclusions: Recapitulate the most important points of your presentation (the ones you want your audience to remember)
7. References: List the sources for your information

For a short presentation such as this one, you may have to address some of the above issues very briefly, or skip them entirely. You can also include a short demonstration, if this is feasible. If you use transparencies or PowerPoint, a rough guideline is to calculate two to three minutes for each slide, so if your presentation has 20 slides, you're most likely going overboard.

Practice

Especially if you don't have much experience with this, you may be nervous about standing in front of an entire class, and talking about a topic you don't really know that well. Being well prepared generally helps with keeping nerves in check, but you can also give one or more trial presentations to one or two friends (maybe your team mates are willing to help here). This is especially helpful for timing issues. Most often, it will take you longer to give the presentation than you initially think.

Readability and Formatting

Use a large font, and don't try to squeeze too much onto one transparency. In PowerPoint, you should reserve fonts of less than about 20 point (it also depends on the font type) to things that are not critical for your audience to read. If you're trying to economize by simply copying your Web pages onto transparencies, most likely you'll end up with too much stuff on one slide, in a font that is far too small. In most cases, it is better to list important aspects as phrases ("bullet points"), rather than formulating it in complete sentences. In our field, most presenters speak without a script, explaining issues shown on the transparency or the screen. Except for short, important statements like definitions, don't read the text written on your transparency to the audience: They can read it faster than you speak it, and it quickly gets boring. If you're afraid that you're too nervous to speak freely, you can read from a prepared script, but then your transparencies should only contain the most important issues in short phrases, not the text you're reading.

PowerPoint and similar software offers very good support for the formatting of presentations. For text, it provides you with predefined templates for the most frequently used types of slides (e.g. list of bullet points, diagrams, graphs, images). Usually it indicates where you need to place text or other objects. If you adhere to the predefined structure, it makes changes to the overall formatting much easier than having to change each item separately.

The Big Moment

Now that you're well prepared, almost nothing can go wrong. Of course, you still may be a little nervous, and minor mishaps may occur. You can't get your friend's laptop to display your presentation on the computer projector. The backup memory stick is in your car in the parking lot way at the other end of campus. The idea to save paper by making two-sided handouts worked nicely, except that the same page is printed on both sides. And by now you're sweating so profusely that the ink on your cheat sheet starts to dissolve. Well, don't worry, almost all of the above has happened to other presenters before (including myself), although not necessarily during the same presentation.

It's Over

Before you realize it, your ten minutes are over, and you've even been able to utter a few additional sentences in response to all the smart questions that came up after your presentation. Now you can sit back, relax, and enoy all those other interesting presentations to come. There's that minor issue of grades for the presentation, but, first of all, it's over, and of course the only question is whether you'll get all twentyfive points, or only twentyfour ;-)