Rules for giving technical presentations

This is an update of an old post, from nearly two years ago. Technical presentations have not improved in that time.

I have attended a lot of conference, scientific and technical presentations, and a significant proportion of those were pretty bad. Another large proportion were mediocre at best, and only a few were pretty good. From what I have observed, and from talking with other presenters, I have formulated the following general rules for giving technical or scientific presentations. While none of these rules are inviolable, please do at least give them some thought the next time you give a presentation.

General Rules

There are two general rules – most of the specific rules come from these two.

1. Don’t waste time, either yours or the audience’s.

2. Don’t insult the intelligence of your audience.


Specific Rules

1. If you have just been introduced with your name and the title of your presentation, don’t repeat this information. You may have them on the first slide, in fact this is probably a good idea, especially if that slide has your email address prominently displayed.

2. If you are presenting to a specialised audience, leave out the background material. For example, if you are presenting to a conference on evolutionary computation, spending even one or two slides explaining what evolutionary computation is violates both general rules.

3. If you have long sentences on your slides, don’t read them aloud. This violates both general rules. It is better to not have long sentences.

4. Outline slides are not necessary. They waste time and assume that the audience isn’t smart enough to notice what you are currently talking about. An exception to this is for long presentations, like hour-long seminars: in this case, it can be useful to repeat the outline slide at strategic points in your presentation. This is to show the audience what part of the talk you are up to, and what they can expect next. Often, different people will be interested in different parts of your talk, so doing this lets them know when they should pay attention.

5. Don’t place equations on your slides unless they are absolutely, positively and irrefutably necessary. If the math is complex enough that it needs to be explained, then it is unlikely that the audience will be able to parse it fast enough to be useful to the presentation. If it is simple, then it can be left out.

6. Know the length of your presentation. A good rule of thumb is an absolute maximum of one slide per minute of presentation, including title, summary and conclusions. Thus, for a fifteen minute presentation, fifteen slides is a good count, ten is better, less than ten is best.

7. Keep to the point of the presentation. If your talk is on bioinformatics, I don’t want to hear about your university’s teaching computer lab.

8. Proof-read your presentation. Use a spell checker. Have someone else check your presentation. If English is not your first language, have it proof-read by someone who is a native speaker. Try to avoid common grammatical errors (infer/imply, affect/effect, explicit/implicit, and so on). Know what words like "literally" actually mean (Jamie Oliver, I'm looking at you!).

9. Know your presentation material. If you have to stop talking to work out what something on a slide actually means, you are wasting everyone’s time. It also makes you look like an idiot.

10. If you are presenting a group of numbers, use a plot of the values, rather than a table, especially if the intention is to compare and contrast the groups. Be careful with the use of colours! A non-trivial proportion of the population can't distinguish between red and green. Be aware that pale colours, such as yellow, can't be seen easily when projected.

11. Moving about is good. Moving energetically is even better. A presenter with physical vigour commands more attention from, and inspires more energy in, an audience than one who stands still, or worse, sits while speaking. That said, moving around like your feet are on fire is distracting. Use your best judgement.

12. Make eye contact with your audience. You should try to make eye-contact with each member of the audience at least once during your presentation. They are here to listen to you speak, so you should acknowledge their existence by actually looking at them. That said, constantly looking at one particular member of the audience is likely to make that person feel uncomfortable.

13. If you cite published work, you must include enough information for audience members to find it! A citation in your presentation like Watts et al (2011) is absolutely useless on its own. At a bare minimum, you would need Watts et al (2011), Ecological Modelling. At least then someone has a chance of finding the paper.

14. Change media regularly. Write on the whiteboard. Show a diagram. Play a video. Hand around a piece of equipment. Anything that is a change from words on a slide.

Reminder: Paper deadline IJCNN 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks is December 19, 2011. This conference is part of the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2012) and is held concurrently with the 2012 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) and IEEE Conference on Fuzzy Logic (Fuzz-IEEE). WCCI 2012 will be held in Brisbane, Australia, June 10-15, 2012.

Paper submission deadline for ICIC 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the International Conference on Intelligent Computing (ICIC) 2012 is January 1, 2012. This conference will be held in Huangshan, China, July 25-29, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for PPSN 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 12th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) 2012 is March 15 2012. This conference will be held in Taormina, Italy, September 1-5, 2012.

Reminder: paper deadline for SIAM SDM 12

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2012 is 14 October 2011. This conference will be held in Anaheim, California, April 26-28, 2012.

Multi-lingual social internetworking

As I promised in this post, the social media sites of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) are now available in several new languages: in the last week, we have set up sites in Korean, Greek, German and Spanish.

I have also posted a document describing how it works: in short, a post is published on the CIS blog, which is then automatically translated by Yahoo! Pipes, then sent to the social media sites. So, it is now possible to follow IEEE CIS news in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Korean, Greek, German and Spanish. These are machine translations, so they can be a bit off sometimes, but I'm told that for the most part they're OK.

A complete listing of the English language social media sites is in this post. The addresses for the Chinese, French and Portuguese sites are listed in this post. Finally, the Korean, Greek, German and Spanish sites are as follows:

Korean

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciskr


Greek

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisgr
http://ieeecisgr.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisgr


German


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisde
http://ieeecisde.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisde


Spanish

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.jaiku.com
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecises
http://ieeecises.tumblr.com
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecises

On plagiarism

Plagiarism is one of the most unpleasant things to deal with when teaching. Panos Ipeirotis wrote a blog post that stimulated some discussion, and was then removed because of legal threats. In short, he detected a fairly large amount of plagiarism in a class, but calling the students out on it created a lot of antipathy towards him, leading to a lower student evaluation, which adversely effected his own financial propects.

The later discussions suggested setting assignments that are impossible for the students to plagiarise. During my tenure teaching at the University of Otago, I saw my fair share (or more than my fair share) of plagiarism, and some of it was pretty bad.


The worst I saw was while teaching my second-year data processing course. It's not like it was difficult to detect, either: the copied portions stood out because the writing style was completely different. A few seconds with Google was usually enough to find the exact source. The easiest-detected case of plagiarism I dealt with was when a student copied from the laboratory manual - which I had written. There were so many cases of plagiarism in that course that the higher-ups changed the way in which plagiarism was dealt with: originally, all cases of plagiarism were sent to the dean of School. After a few weeks of me sending students to them, the regulation was changed to sending them to the head of department. The only penalty the students received, though, was a zero for the work that they had plagiarsied in. By the end of the year, I'd detected more plagiarism than the rest of the department put together, which raises the question: did more students plagiarise in my course, or was I just better at detecting them? If the former, was it because my course was harder? Because it was a required course that the students weren't really interested in? Or were the students really not smart enough to do the course without cheating? If the latter, why did I detect more than the other teaching staff? Was I the only one who read the assignments carefully? Did the other teaching staff not care? Or was it that the assessments in other courses were such that plagiarism was harder to commit in the first place, that is, more practically oriented?

While most of the plagiarism I dealt with was from undergrads, I have come across it reviewing papers, as well. Again, it was easy to detect: most of the paper was written very badly, apart from two or three paragraphs. Again, a few seconds work on Google was enough to find the original source. Needless to say, the paper was rejected. Since it was only a conference paper, I doubt that there were any repercussions on the authors.

As far as student plagiarism is concerned, I agree with the notion that it is better to spend time setting assessments that can't be plagiarised. The one course I taught that never had a problem with plagiarism was my fourth-year computational intelligence course. Now, that is partly likely to be because the students were highly-motivated, honours-level students, but also because of the nature of the lectures and assessment. Rather than me giving lectures twice a week, students took turns researching and presenting on a topic. There was a list of permissible topics for each week, so that the presentations followed the curriculum I had set out for the course, the students got support in researching their talk, and I went over each presentation before it was given. The practical work was entirely project-oriented, where again the students selected a project that interested them. This actually worked very well: it taught the students valuable skills and left no scope for plagiarism. I wonder, though, how well it would work for third or even second year students?

Perhaps a more important question is, why do students plagiarise? If we could answer that question, could plagiarism be eradicated? Or would there always be some students who are simply so desperate (or so unable / unwilling to do the work) that they will always plagiarise?

Conference paper deadline: ICSI 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the Third International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ICSI) 2012 is December 31, 2011. This conference will be held in Shenzhen, China, June 17-20, 2012.

Call for papers: PRICAI 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the 12th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) 2012 is March 1, 2012. This conference will be held in Kuching, Malaysia, September 3-7, 2012.

Reminder: paper deadline for AAMAS 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submission of abstracts to the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2012 is 7 October 2011, with full papers due 12 October 2011. This conference will be held in Valencia, Spain, 4-8 June 2012.

Conference paper deadline: ICNC-FSKD 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 8th International Conference on Natural Computation and 9th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery is 15 November 2011. These conferences will be jointly held in Chongqing, China, 29-31 May, 2011.

Reminder: paper deadline for KES-IIMSS 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES IIMSS 2012) is 1st December 2011. This conference will be held in Gifu, Japan, 23-25 May 2012, simultaneously with the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Decision Technologies.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for KES-IDT 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Decision Technologies (KES-IDT 2012) is 1 December 2011. This conference will be held in Gifu, Japan, 23-25 May, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for ICARIS 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 11th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS) 2012 is 1 March 2012. This conference will be held in Taormina, Italy, 28-21 July, 2012

Reminder: paper deadline ICFSNC 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Neural Computing (ICFSNC) 2012 is 30 November 2011. This conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain, April 11-13, 2012.

The problem with academic journals

George Monbiot nicely summarises the problems with academic journals as they currently stand.

• Journals get their content for free (papers submitted by authors).
• Journals get their quality control for free (reviewers volunteering their time).
• Journals get their editors for free (more volunteers).
• Journals charge thousands of dollars per year for subscriptions.

Yet, academics must publish in journals to advance their careers: university managers and funding bodies all like the nice, simple metric of counting the number of publications an academic has published in high-impact journals. And most of the high-impact journals are the ones that cost thousands per year.
 
Monbiot argues that this has the effect of shutting cutting-edge science behind extremely high paywalls, which has the effect of making science inaccessible to most of the population. When this happens, is it any surprise that hokum like the anti-vaccination movement takes hold in the population? Or that creationist baloney circulates so widely?

I think it's time for scientists, and leading scientists at that, to start submitting more to open-access journals. More importantly, it's time for managers and funding bodies to ditch the overly simplistic measures of performance that are derived from impact factors. Otherwise, things are not going to end well.

Reminder: paper deadline for CINTI 2011

A reminder that the deadline to submit papers to the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Informatics (CINTI) 2011 is September 30 2011. This conference will be held in Budapest, Hungary, November 21-22 2011.

Conference paper deadline: ECAI 2012

The deadline for papers submitted to the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) 2012 is 6 March 2012. This conference will be held in Montpellier, France, 27-21 August, 2012.

Reminder: Paper submission deadline for PAKDD 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting abstracts to the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) 2012 is 25 September 2011. This conference will be held in Kuala Lumpur 29 May - 1 June, 2012.

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Multi-Lingual Social Media

The social media presences of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society now include sites in languages other than English. This work has been carried out by the Social Media subcommittee, and so far, we have set up sites for Chinese (Simplified), French and Portuguese.

More sites are being developed and I'll blog about those when they become available. I'm also working on a report describing how the automatic translation is done, similar to this previous post on connecting social media sites. The English language sites are listed in this post. The new sites are listed below.

Chinese


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeeciscn
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeeciscn
http://www.plerb.com/ieeeciscn
http://ieeecis-cn.tumblr.com/
http://zuosa.com/ieeecis
http://ieeeciscn.jaiku.com/
http://digu.com/opi37q
http://www.qaiku.com/home/ieeeciscn/
http://www.plurk.com/ieeeciscn
http://weibo.com/ieeecis

French


http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecisfr
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecisfr
http://ieeecisfr.jaiku.com/

Portuguese

http://twitter.com/#!/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.tumblr.com/
http://shoutitout.shoutem.com/ieeecispt
http://www.plerb.com/ieeecispt
http://ieeecispt.jaiku.com/