Need Help in Paper Presentation
Answers
Read the entire paper at least 3 times.
You need to be able to explain the details in the paper (even the ugly tricky notation)
You need to be able to provide a critical analysis of the paper
Check out references in the related work section of the paper. (this will help you put the paper in context of a larger body of work and will help you critique the paper's results/contributions)
Look at Paper Reading Advice for more details.
Find the important ideas A paper has many details but only one or two main ideas; structure your talk around these main ideas.
Create a Talk Outline
Your talk should be organized in a top-down manner.
You should have the following main sections in your talk:
Introduction, The Big Picture: what, why, how, and why we should care (motivation). Be sure to include:
a statement of the problem being solved (what)
motivation and putting the work in context (why and why should we care)
a high-level view of the author's solution (how)
Details of solution
Results demonstrating/proving their solution
Critic of Work (possibly compare to related work)
Conclusions & Future Directions for this work
The talk should be organized as the important ideas first, the details second, conclusions last. Each section of your talk should be organized in a similar manor: high-level important points first, details second, summarize high-level points last. If the paper is well written, you can use the paper's organization as a guide.
Next, Design your slides
Slide Organization Your slides should be organized like an outline--a few main points, with sub points under each one.
Your slides are a guide for your talk not a word-for-word copy of your talk. List specific points that you want to talk about as sub-topics of each main topic. If there are particular details that you want to discuss, outline them on the slide and keep written notes for you to refer to in your talk rather than writing all the details on the slide.
Summarize Main Points You should have a summary slide of the main ideas at the end.
If applicable, Include a list of open questions from the paper
It is okay to waste space Add just enough prose prose to present the main points and highlight the main parts of each point. Use phrases rather than complete sentences and use large fonts. You can use acronyms and abbreviations sparingly, however you should say the complete name when you talk about about them. For example, if you abbreviate processes to procs on a slide, say "processes" when you talk about the point not "procs". Similarly, if your create an acronym for your super fast multi-cast implementation SFMC and refer to the old slow multi-cast implementation as OSMC, then say "our super fast multi-cast" and "the old slow multi-cast" rather than "SFMC" and "OSMC". The exception is for well-known acronyms such as PVM, MPI, API, JVM, etc.
A picture is worth a thousand words Use figures and graphs to explain implementation and results. It is very hard to describe a system implementation without having a picture of the components of the system. I once attended a talk about Intel's I64 architecture where the speaker tried to discuss the details of the layout of the chip and the interactions between the components without having any figures. It made for a very bad talk and a very hostile audience.