Class Presentation Guidelines

General guidelines

You will need to present one or two papers from the reading list. You will be given 35 minutes to present a paper and lead the discussion on the topic. If you are presenting multiple papers (on the same topic), then you can utilize the entire class for your presentation (I'll allow group presentations if you choose this option).

The papers will be covered in the approximate order in which they are listed. I'll post a schedule of class presentations as soon as everyone has signed up. Since we do not have time to cover all the papers in the reading list, we will skip some papers (based on people's preferences). Please send me a list of your top three choices by email (along with the name of your group members, if you decide to do a group presentation---you'll need to pick multiple papers if you choose this option).

Suggestions for presentations

Plan to spend 20-25 minutes on the talk (10 minutes of motivation, 10 minutes explaining the main idea and results, 5 minutes summarizing the paper and providing your perspective).

This will leave 10-15 minutes for a discussion on the topic. The entire class will be involved in the discussion. At the end of the discussion, we should have answered some of the following questions:

  1. Why is this a significant problem?
  2. Are there alternate approaches to solve this problem?
  3. Can we improve the techniques proposed in the paper?
If you do a group presentation, you'll have twice as much time to do your presentation.

You owe it to your colleagues to do a good job on the presentation. To ensure high quality talks, you are required to turn in a rough draft of your presentation materials (slides, questions that you would like to raise during the discussions, etc.) at least one class in advance. You can also come by and talk to me about your presentation.


Prashant Shenoy
Last modified: Tue Sep 15 17:14:38 EDT 1998