Presentations

Students will develop and deliver a presentation on an assigned topic individually. Each student should present twice during the course. Each presentation will be worth 10% of the total grade, summing up to 20% of the total grade.

  • Signup: Shortly after the first week, an email will go out to all the registered students with the link to a signup sheet (the link will also be posted on Piazza). The topic assignment is first come, first served, though in case nobody signs up for some topics, we may ask some students to switch. To ensure coverage, each student should sign up at least four preferred topics.

  • Preparation: Please read the assigned papers thoroughly and gain a good understanding of the research topics before making the presentation slides. Pay attention to both high-level connections across different research works and also key technical details. The presentation should provide a background of the topic, problem formulation, related work, proposed method, key results, and discussions. Optionally, the presenter could run live demos or show video results to the audience during the talk.

  • Early feedbacks: You should reach out to Shenlong to email your draft slides or schedule an office hour for a dry-run at least one week before your presentation date. The goal is to enable feedback to ensure the highest possible quality of the in-class presentation.

  • Presentation slides: By the day before the scheduled presentation, the presenter must post the link of the slides on Piazza, to be made available to all the students. (The slides can be further polished before the class). In addition, the presenter should track the Piazza open-ended questions regarding each topic. After the presentation, the group must submit the slides in PowerPoint or Google slides format to Shenlong, and we will make them available on the course webpage.

  • In-class presentation: Presentations will be delivered through zoom. Each presentation will be strictly within 25 minutes. After each presentation, we will do 5 minutes Q&A. We will then have 10 minutes of open-ended discussions moderated by the presenter. The discussion questions will be posted on Piazza by the instructor and paper reviewers. The presenters are encouraged to incorporate some questions and comments from the Piazza posts in their presentations.

Timeline

  • Friday 8/27: Topic Preference Form Due
  • Friday 9/10: Presentation Assignments out
  • Seven days before the presentation: Early Feedback / Dry-Run Due
  • One day before the presentation: Slides link due

Grading Scheme

The presentations will be graded in the following aspects:

  • Clarity of presentation;
  • Literature reviews and the key challenges addressed by this work;
  • Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the research;
  • Discussions of potential future research directions and applications;
  • Response to questions and engage in open-ended discussions (in-class and on Piazza).

Use of External Sources

It is not allowed to use an entire slide deck from another source “as is” as the basis for your presentation. It is OK to “borrow” some content, graphics, or demos. However, please explicitly give credit whenever you use material from other sources.

Useful Resources