CS 553

Giving an effective paper presentation

Giving an effective paper presentation is a difficult task most students are not good at. Following these points should help you give better presentations in general, and presentations of research results in particular.

Talk Organization

Introduction: describe area, type of work, motivate the problem. Summarize the research contributions

Middle: What was the hypothesis? Discuss data, system, results. Did they meet their goals?

Conclusion: What did you learn? What should we remember? What was the importance of the contributions? What is open for future work or additional unsolved problems?

Who are the authors?

What are the goals of the paper?

1. Vision: This is Nirvana

2. Directional: How to get to Nirvana

3. Position: This is good/bad

4. Behavioral: How does something behave/work.

5. Algorithmic: An algorithm for doing something.

What is the big picture of the area?

1. Main goals, What is the “Nirvana” of the area?

2. What are considered hard or interesting problems?

3. What is considered easy?

4. When did people start working on these kinds of problems and how much progress has been made?

How does this paper fit into the goals of the research area?

Research contributions:

1. Advances state of the art?

2. Presents evidence to support a hypothesis?

   1. Analytic modeling

   2. Simulation (trace-driven or synthetic data?)

   3. Emulation

   4. Observation on real systems

3. Presents evidence to debunk a widely held belief?

4. How narrow or broadly applicable are the results?