CS 584, Presentation Guidelines

Your presentations will be graded. Here are the attributes that will contribute to your grade.

• Substance: Know what you are talking about. Definitely know more than the students, who have also read the paper.
• Dig deeper than the paper: The students already know how to read, so your job is not to tell them just what the paper says, unless the paper itself is pretty heavy going. Usually, you will need to dig deeper than the paper does, so as to add insights. You can read related papers to do so, or experiment with the language, or compare to other languages, or apply the concepts to some language, or compare it to other relevant things you have learned, or etc.
• If you want to, you can spend your entire presentation just answering the (best of) the questions the other students submitted. You must answer a minimum of 4 of their questions. PLUS -- for presentations after date-TBA, you must provide a minimum of 1 insight/implication that is particular to YOUR particular consumer/task that you are working on.
• Clarity: Your job is to educate. If your material is not organized or your explanations are not clear, you will not succeed at educating. Visual aids will be necessary (even if the aid is only the whiteboard).
• No time overruns: Part of the purpose is to give you experience giving technical presentations. All technical presentations have a time limit, and it is a "hard" deadline. If your time is up, you will be cut off mid-sentence, and that is as much of the presentation as you can be graded on. The time allottment for each presentation is 20 minutes, leaving 5 minutes for additional questions/follow-up discussions, etc. Plan accordingly.

Note 1: Presenters do not have to submit discussion questions. This applies to the paper they are presenting, as well as any other papers being presented that day.

Note 2: Breadth of coverage is not required. Do not feel that you need to cover everything in the paper, or even every section of the paper. Your mission is depth and insights, not breadth. (Remember, the students have already read the paper themselves -- they don't need you to read it to them.)

Note 3: There will be occasional presentations that have different specs than this. I'll tell you if your presentation is one of those.