Assignment 3: Research Paper Presentation

DUE WEDNESDAY NOV 20 AT 11:59PM.

Table of contents

• General Guidelines
  • Suggested presentation outline
  • Tips for Slide Decks
• Submission and Grading

You will be presenting one of the randomly assigned research papers with your project group. Each presentation will be about 20 mins + 5mins for questions. The list of research papers can be found here.

Please email your slides to the staff (cs6400-staff@groups.gatech.edu) by 2 p.m. on the day of the presentation.

General Guidelines

• Give a quick read to the paper. The papers are detailed and represent a good body of work. Some are technically quite dense – the TAs and instructor can help with clarifications if needed. Please discuss the paper among yourselves and decide how best it should be presented. All can learn this way.

• You are expected to cover all parts/all sections of the paper, but not in same level of detail. If some sections are hard to follow, feel free to ask the TAs. To help you prepare the presentation, we have prepared a detailed guideline that suggests what to emphasize and what to skip in each paper. The paper contents are classifies into High/Medium/Low in terms of importance when it comes to presenting the paper.

• If you use any external sources, identify that as a reference (URL) at the bottom of the slide. External published papers must be given as a complete reference in the footnote of the slide. Wikipedia is OK, but anything you use must be acknowledged in the footnote of the slide.

• Given the limited time, you need to emphasize the main concepts and contributions in this paper. The class must leave with a good feel for what this paper is all about and for which main points this work is important.

• Make up 2 “study questions” that will help someone with studying this paper. Make questions that address important technical concepts discussed in the paper, and which requires one to understand the paper well to answer them. In other words, questions should have answers that are substantial - not just Yes/No type answer or a listing of something that is directly in the paper. Place them on the last slide.

• The exam 2 will include short questions on papers and students will use your presentation slides as a study guide for the paper. All presentations will be posted online and are accessible during the exam 2.

Suggested presentation outline

Most presentations should include the following sections:

1. Background and motivation: what problem is the paper trying to solve and why does it matter? (3min)
2. Related work: why hasn’t prior work been able to address the problem? (2min)
3. Overview: what’s the “big idea” of the paper? Give a high-level overview of the proposed solution and describe the paper’s main claims and contributions. (1min)
4. Technical details: present enough technical details of the main contributions for the audience to understand the solution at a high level (8min)
   • Discuss new concepts and ideas presented
   • Give examples/code to support the ideas. Most papers already contain some running examples that explain the main technical idea.
5. Evaluation: how did the authors justify their claims? (5min)
   • What hypotheses are the authors trying to validate?
   • What baselines did the authors compare against? You will most likely find some prior works here.
   • Present and explain results of main experiments with supporting tables and figures.
6. Conclusion: restate the main contributions, and discuss limitations and future work (1min)
   • Any shortcomings or negatives of the approach in your opinion. Please do not force yourself to find negatives, as most of these papers are landmark papers.
   • Further work needed as per authors and in your opinion
7. 2 study questions (no need to present, just include the slides)

Note: The time allocation provided is a rough guideline and may vary depending on the paper’s content and importance of each section. or example, for benchmark papers, you are expected to spend a significant amount of time on the evaluations. Please adjust as necessary according to the priority outlined in the paper presentation guidelines.

Tips for Slide Decks

• The title slide should be the full title of the paper with its authors, where published and when. At the bottom place presenters’ names.
• Number each slide and place presenter name next to the number.
• Use the space on slides wisely – not too little or too much content on one slide.
• Make about 20-25 slides per presentation. Code snippets, algorithms and figures from the paper can be used from the paper as they are- clearly state figure no. etc. (No need to repeat paper reference on each slide). Any additional figures etc. from the web are fine if you acknowledge them.
• Try to divide the presentation evenly among the members of the group. Make a logical division. If a member appears back and forth – that is OK.
• For many topics, there is more active work going on that you can find on Apache, dblp.uni-trier.de and other websites. Please feel free to go beyond the paper and include such details – but give an exact reference with a URL. This will add to the impact of the paper presentation and positively influences the grade.

Submission and Grading

Submit your paper presentation slide deck on canvas. Only one submission is required per group.

This assignment is worth 10% of your grade.

• Presentation (18 pts): The team is looked upon as a whole for the overall presentation and content. The team presentation will be graded based on the effort put in, the quality of the presentation, and the level of understanding of the materials.
• Participation (2 pts): To receive the participation points, your team must ask at least two questions during other groups’ presentations (only for presentations on different days than your own). Before asking a question during the class, please inform the staff your group number.