How to give a good presentation�

Noor Awad, Andre’ Biedenkapp, Frank Hutter

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Machine Learning Lab

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Some parts of this presentation are adapted from �Thomas Brox’s slides, with permission.

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Importance of good presentation skills

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You’ll have to give a lot of �presentations in your life �(both in academia and industry)

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These presentations can �decide whether

• You get a job
• Your favourite project gets funded
• You get the resources you need
• …

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Source: pixabay.com

Getting your points across

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What matters is what your audience gets �(not which points you “covered”)

• Often, the audience is not as interested in the topic as you
• You’ll have to tell them why they should care
• If nobody cares or understands it’s typically your own fault

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At least the key points must get across to everyone

Some details may only be for experts, that’s OK

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Simple rules for a great presentation

1. Structure is key
2. Adapt your talk to your audience
3. Present in pictures
4. Have readable slides
5. Practice
6. Control your technical equipment
7. Behave naturally
8. Learn from the mistakes of others

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Simple rules for a great presentation

1. Structure is key
2. Adapt your talk to your audience
3. Present in pictures
4. Have readable slides
5. Practice
6. Control your technical equipment
7. Behave naturally
8. Learn from the mistakes of others

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Empathize with your audience!

Think about the audience (and for yourself)!

Rule #1: Structure is key

High level to low level to high level

• Catch your audience’s attention
• Then tell them what you’ll tell them and why they should care (priming)
• Then tell it to them
• Then tell them what you just told them

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Make transitions clear, don’t forget the “meta-talk”

• E.g., In order to explain X, first I’ll need to explain Y
• E.g., Now that we’ve seen X and Y, we have the ingredients to do Z
• Remind the audience where you are in the talk, e.g. using a reoccurring outline slide
• Use meaningful titles

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Don’t get lost in details

• In case of doubt leave out some details
• To scientists, some detail is often important; you can use a “T-structure”: combine broad coverage of a topic with depth about one aspect

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Rule #1: Structure is key

Start your presentation with

• a brief introduction
• a motivation of why your presentation matters and why it is interesting to the audience

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End your presentation with

• a summary of the main takeaways
• a lookout
• a clear statement announcing the end of your presentation, e.g. That‘s it from my side and now I am happy to answer questions
• a Thank-you slide is not necessary, better show the conclusion/discussion slide (unless you thank collaborators)

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How to give a good presentation

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Rule #2: Adapt your talk to your audience

The paper you are presenting is written for a specialized research community

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• But your audience often has a different background
• You will need to cover the necessary background
• We are experts on some topics – �don’t bore us with what we already know

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• In general
• A talk to the CEO is completely different than one to the tech support group
• A talk applying method X to problem Y is completely different when you’re talking to community studying X or Y

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Rule #3: Present in pictures

Slides full of text are hard to follow

• The audience will read and not listen to you
• Reduce text, use more images
• Use animation only to guide attention

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Rule #3: Present in pictures

For every plot in your presentation, make sure

• that the plot has axes labels and a legend
• that the resolution is high enough
• that the colors are distinguishable �(and colorblind-friendly), see e.g. colorbrewer2.org
• that you take enough time to explain the plot

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→ The same also applies to equations

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Rule #4: Have readable slides

• Can you read this text?
• Also from the back? Remember, the contrast and resolution of your laptop is usually much better than that of the projector
• Sometimes the font size is too tiny
• Not all animations are useful

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• Sans-serif fonts are easier to read from the back than serif-fonts

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• Also still quite common is yellow text on white ground

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• Meke sure tere are no typos in yur slides

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• Size up figures to use most of the slide. A slide does not need a big frame.

Rule #5: Practice

1. Prepare what you want to say, do not improvise!
• Have a time budget for each part

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• Write down bullet points of what you want to say in each part
• Say it out loud a few times & check the timing for the part
• Then do the part a few times without looking at your notes

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• Write out exactly what you want to say in the first minute and as a closing statement
• You are most nervous in the beginning
• You want to end pointedly
• Practice first minute and closing statement at least 10 times

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• Then put it all together
• Do the transitions work?
• Always get stuck at the same point? Change that point!
• Don’t speak too fast! Speaking too slowly is almost impossible

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Rule #6: Control your technical equipment

Checklist:

• Do you have to bring your own laptop?
• Does your laptop work with the projector?
• Do you have the right dongle?
• Internet connection switched off?
• Desktop free of too personal items?
• Screen saver switched off?
• Enough battery or laptop plugged in?
• Is your presentation in the right format, e.g. pdf, pptx?
• Do all videos show properly?
• (if applicable) Does your laser pointer work?

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Prepare and test your equipment before the talk!

Rule #7: Behave naturally

Keep eye contact with the audience; don’t turn your back

→ But do not wonder what they might think of your presentation! (now it’s too late)

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Relax

• Breathing in & out deeply once can help
• Practice helps building confidence

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Answering questions:

• First listen to the whole question carefully; don’t interrupt
• Long/multiple questions: take bullet point notes
• Think about how you can best answer a question before you answer it
• Give short and precise answers

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Rule #8: Learn from the mistakes of others

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If you are in the audience and

• You cannot follow the talk
• You are totally bored
• You are irritated by a certain behavior of the presenter

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Then you should

• Analyze what went wrong
• Make sure to give them (friendly & constructive) feedback and do not make the same mistakes

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Giving constructive feedback

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1. Start with something positive
• In your own reviews you don’t want to hear only negative things, either
• People are more receptive to criticism after hearing something positive

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• Make concrete suggestions
• Bad example: The lecture was bad
• Good example: �I couldn’t follow the math because I couldn’t read your handwriting on the board – better use a projector or slides

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Rule #8: Learn from the mistakes of others

Mistakes, that are easy to avoid:

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• Talking too slow/fast/loud/quietly
• Bad time management, e.g. a 15 minute talk should last 15 minutes
• Preparing too many slides, e.g. 100 slides for 15 minutes
• Not spending enough time on a slide
• Technical difficulties
• Improvising

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Good scientific behavior

1. Never present other people’s work as your own
• Never copy-paste (even critical when copying from your own work; self-plagiarism)
• Clearly mention the material you used for your work�(e.g. code, data, papers; if unpublished material, ask before you use it)
• State explicitly what is your contribution

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• Never report false scientific results
• Do not fake data to get the results you want (of course!)
• Avoid situations that could easily lead to false results
• Document what you did
• Make sure comparisons are fair
• Double check for mistakes (particularly when results are surprisingly good)

→ This holds for this seminar, but also for reports, theses, papers, grant proposals, interviews, personal communication

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How to cite others’ work

Quotes from other work should have quotation marks:

X and Y [12] define this problem as follows : “…”

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Provide references for figures

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Mention & clarify contributions from others:

The results reported in this section are based on a joint project with X. �While he had the main idea and wrote all the code, I was responsible for the experiments.��For our implementation, we built upon the source code provided by X [13].

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Source: Jones et al [1998]

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Never cheat or plagiarize on purpose, clearly mark your references, adopt best practices for avoiding mistakes

Takeaways

Giving good presentations can be learned

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There are simple rules to give a great presentations:

• Structure is key
• Adapt your talk to your audience
• Present in pictures
• Have readable slides
• Practice
• Control your technical equipment
• Behave naturally
• Learn from the mistakes of others

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Takeaways

Giving good presentations can be learned

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There are simple rules to give a great presentations:

• Structure is key
• Adapt your talk to your audience
• Present in pictures
• Have readable slides
• Practice
• Control your technical equipment
• Behave naturally
• Learn from the mistakes of others

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Empathize with your audience!

Think about the audience (and for yourself)!

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Source: phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1553

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