Final Presentation
DUE IN CLASS THE WEEK OF DECEMBER 4-8.
Table of contents
Tell us what you’ve achieved this semester! Talks and presentations are one of the main mechanisms through which researchers communicate their ideas. As part of your final project, you’ll be giving a talk on your research.
Presentation Format
You have 10 minutes (+ about 2 minutes for questions) to present your research to the rest of the class. To ensure a smooth flow between projects, we will be running everything off a shared Google Slides deck: link TBA. So, create your slides using Google Slides, and insert them after the title card for your project team. We will run the presentation in presenter mode, so you’ll be able to see any presenter notes you leave.
The timing means you won’t be able to cover every detail of your project. Think about what you really want to communicate. It likely draws heavily from your introduction and bit flip:
- What’s the problem, briefly, and why does it matter?
- Why hasn’t prior work been able to address the problem? Set up the bit.
- What’s your big idea? Flip the bit.
- Explain enough technical detail for the listener to understand what you did, at a high level.
- Explain enough about your results for the listener to understand what you observed, at a high level.
- Conclude with a restatement of your thesis.
Assume that the audience for your talk is a researcher in your broad area (e.g., databases, machine learning). So, you don’t need to re-introduce the whole field, for example. A sentence or two to situate your work in the field is good, but spend the rest of the time telling us what you did.
This presentation is worth a substantial amount of your grade, so it’s worth practicing it. At 10 minutes long, you and your team can practice it multiple times in much less than an hour! It’s also short enough that you might consider writing out parts of what you want to say long-hand, make sure you convey information efficiently and effectively. Practice it enough times so that you have it basically memorized, but not so memorized that you get flustered if you skip a word or someone asks a question.
Submission and Grading
Add your slides to the shared Google Slides deck before class starts. Your final grade for the presentation will be based on evaluations from both the course staff (31/40) and your peers (9/40)
Course Staff Evaluation
The instructor and TAs will grade your presentation based on the following criteria:
- Structure: did the presentation organize its question, thesis, and evidence effectively? (7pt)
- Clarity: did the presentation convey the details in a way that a general expert in the field could follow? (7pt)
- Timing: did the presentation organize its time well, and stick to the 10-minute limit? (7pt)
- Q&A: Did the student successfully address audience questions? Did the student ask at least one audience question to someone else? (7pt)
- Participation: did the student attend both presentation sessions and submit peer evaluations (3pt)
Peer Evaluation
During class, you will perform peer evaluations for all other groups’ presentations. You are expected to evaluate presentations using the following criteria:
- Structure: did the presentation organize its question, thesis, and evidence effectively? (3pt)
- Clarity: did the presentation convey the details in a way that a general expert in the field could follow? (3pt)
- Timing: did the presentation organize its time well, and stick to the 10-minute limit? (3pt)