How to give a bad talk

(X commandments, and more!)

Oral Presentation Advice

FREE Advice! Take it for what it is worth!

Arnab Bhattacharya Dept. of CMPMS, TIFR arnab.tifr@gmail.com

(liberally lifted from David A. Patterson @ University of California-Berkeley)
Arnab Bhattacharya VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Outline

Pattersons 10 Commandments
(with some illustrations!)

Patterson in the age of Powerpoint Arnabs randomly useful observations

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Thou shalt not be neat

Why waste research time preparing slides? Ignore spelling, grammar and legibility! Who cares what 50 people think?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

II

Thou shalt not waste space

Transparencies are expensive! If you can save five slides in each of four talks per year, you save 500Rs./year!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

II

Thou shalt not waste space

Transparencies are expensive! If you can save five slides in each of four talks per year, you save 500Rs./year!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

II

Thou shalt not waste space

Transparencies are expensive! If you can save five slides in each of four talks per year, you save 500Rs./year!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

II

Thou shalt not waste space

Worlds worst slide 2009 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war,' Gen. Stanley McChrystal, US and NATO force commander

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

II

Thou shalt not waste space

Transparencies are expensive! If you can save five slides in each of four talks per year, you save 500Rs./year!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

IV

Thou shalt not covet brevity

Scientists are supposed to do science and writing isnt one of their skills. Anyway it is hard enough to convert the last few weeks work into the six page paper that needs to be submitted. Since I have spent all this time writing up my report, Im just going to have to copy and paste this into my presentation. This will save me a lot of time. Also, Ill get this nice chance to read out everything to the audience. That way it will also ensure that there will be no problem to kill enough time and make my talk last for 15 minutes. Maybe therell actually be no time to ask questions at the end of it, which would actually be just great as well.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

III

Thou shalt not covet brevity

Do you want to continue the stereotype that scientists can't write?! Always use complete sentences, never just key words. If possible, use whole paragraphs and read every word!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

III

Thou shalt not covet brevity

Do you want to continue the stereotype that scientists can't write?! Always use complete sentences, never just key words. If possible, use whole paragraphs and read every word!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

III

Thou shalt not covet brevity

Centenary Public Lecture Series!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

IV

Thou shalt cover thy naked slides

You need the suspense! Overlays are too flashy.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Thou shalt not write large

Be humble -- use a small font.

Important people sit in front. Who cares about the riff-raff?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Thou shalt not write large

Be humble -- use a small font.

Important people sit in front. Who cares about the riff-raff?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VI

Thou shalt not use colour

Flagrant use of colour indicates uncareful research.

Also, why emphasize some words over others?!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Thou shalt not write large

Be humble -- use a small font.

Important people sit in front. Who cares about the riff-raff?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VI

Thou shalt not use colour

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VI

Thou shalt not use colour

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VI

Thou shalt not use colour

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VI

Thou shalt not use colour

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VII

Thou shalt not illustrate

Confucius says ``A picture = 10K words,'' but Dijkstra says ``Pictures are for weak minds.''

Who are you going to believe? Wisdom from the

ages or the person who first counted goto's?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

VIII

Thou shalt not make eye contact

You should avert eyes to show respect.

Blocking the screen can also add mystery.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

IX

Thou shalt not skip slides in a long talk

You prepared the slides; people came for your whole talk; so just talk faster. Skip your summary and conclusions if necessary.

Commandment X is most important. Even if you break the other nine, this one can save you.
Arnab Bhattacharya VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Thou shalt not practice

Why waste research time practicing a talk? It could take several hours out of your two months of research!
How can you appear spontaneous if you practice?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Guaranteed Results !

Those are some NASTY colors Please let it be OVER

Hey it matches his t-shirt .

What does that slide say? Dunno, Im playing tetris zzz

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

How do we make it more of.

I wonder if this technique would work for my problem

I never thought of that!

Lets talk to her at the break

I finally figured this one! Might join TIFR for a PhD though its not Interesting my main area

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

T-48(?) hours to VSRP seminar

So what do I do.?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Oral Presentations

Strategy
understand purpose of communication

Structure
develop a logically compelling story proper organization, visual aids, contingencies, supplementary materials

Style
controlled enthusiasm
(tone, gestures, eye-contact. enthusiasm loudness)

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Know your audience

Keep in mind They might be tired They can read They have probably not read your report.. They are thinking Why should I listen? Non-experts will tune off within 2 minutes And the experts will too, after 5 minutes What can you do?

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Some Tips

KISS
Focus on getting a few key points across

Repeat Key Insights

tell them what you're going to tell them (Forecast) tell them, and tell them what you told them (Summary).

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

A Generic 20 min Reporting Results Talk

Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)

Forecast (1 slide)
Give gist of problem attacked and insight found (What is the one idea you want people to leave with? This is the "abstract" of an oral presentation.)

Outline (1 slide)
Give talk structure. (at the bottom of title slide?)

Background / Motivation (1-2 slides)

(Why should anyone care? Most speakers overestimate how much the audience knows about the problem they are attacking.)

Related Work (0-1 slides)

Cover superficially or omit; refer people to your paper.

Methods (1 slide)
Cover quickly in short talks; refer people to your paper.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

A Generic 20 min Talk II

Results (4-6 slides)
This is main body of the talk. Present key results and key insights. (Do not superficially cover all results; cover key result well. Do not put up large tables of numbers.)

Summary (1 slide) Future Work (0-1 slides)

Optionally give problems this research opens up.

Backup Slides (0-3 slides) Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total) to answer expected questions.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Have you experienced this????

You are trapped in a poorly ventilated room. The only source of light is an out-of-focus projection screen. The

speaker has been droning on for 45 minutes, subjecting

you to a tedious procession of slides. Bullets burst out in

psychedelic colours as text flies across the screen..

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Have you experienced this????

Rather than listen, you think about escape: The coffee break is still an hour awayYou want to feign a narcoleptic episode. You think of sticking a metal object in a nearby electrical socket to cut off the power supply.

You want to stand up and yell at the top of your lungs,

"Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!"

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

PowerPointlessness

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

PowerPoint: Blessing or Curse?

It is excellent for making slides

Some features can really help explain things if used well (animations, hyperlinks) However, it is easy to make complicated view graphs - message is lost

It can crash (Windows knows which is your critical

graph.)

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Avoiding PPTlessness : 7 commandments Thou shalt not use all the colours of the rainbow Thou shalt not consort with Clip Art

Thou shalt not make the text fly

Thou shalt not read off the screen

Thou shalt not assume the audience has 20/20 vision

Thou shalt not put thy faith in machines

Thou shalt not fear darkness

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

It is excellent for making view graphs It can help convey a message make cool slIDEs !! It is easy to make complicated view graphs - message is lost

I wish I COULD

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Following Pattersons 10 commandments

We describe the philosophy and design of the control flow machine, and present the results of detailed simulations of the performance of a single processing element. Each factor is compared with the measured performance of an advanced von Neumann computer running equivalent code. It is shown that the control flow processor compares favorably in the program. We present a denotational semantics for a logic program to construct a control flow for the logic program. The control flow is defined as an algebraic manipulator of idempotent substitutions and it virtually reflects the resolution deductions. We also present a bottom-up compilation of medium grain clusters from a fine grain control flow graph. We compare the basic block and the dependence sets algorithms that partition control flow graphs into clusters. A hierarchical macro-control-flow computation allows them to exploit the coarse grain parallelism inside a macrotask, such as a subroutine or a loop, hierarchically. We use a hierarchical definition of macrotasks, a parallelism extraction scheme among macrotasks defined inside an upper layer macrotask, and a scheduling scheme which assigns hierarchical macrotasks on hierarchical clusters. We apply a parallel simulation scheme to a real problem: the simulation of a control flow architecture, and we compare the performance of this simulator with that of a sequential one. Moreover, we investigate the effect of modeling the application on the performance of the simulator. Our study indicates that parallel simulation can reduce the execution time significantly if appropriate modeling is used. We have demonstrated that to achieve the best execution time for a control flow program, the number of nodes within the system and the type of mapping scheme used are particularly important. In addition, we observe that a large number of subsystem nodes allows more actors to be fired concurrently, but the communication overhead in passing control tokens to their destination nodes causes the overall execution time to increase substantially. The relationship between the mapping scheme employed and locality effect in a program are discussed. The mapping scheme employed has to exhibit a strong locality effect in order to allow efficient execution Medium grain execution can benefit from a higher output bandwidth of a processor and finally, a simple superscalar processor with an issue rate of ten is sufficient to exploit the internal parallelism of a cluster. Although the technique does not exhaustively detect all possible errors, it detects nontrivial errors with a worst-case complexity quadratic to the system size. It can be automated and applied to systems with arbitrary loops and nondeterminism.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Font Choice
Use a plain font (sans serif) Sans Serif - easy to read
Arial, Verdana, Comic Sans MS, Helvetica . . .

Serif - difficult to read

Times new roman, Courier, Monotype Corsiva

Use sufficiently large letters (18-24 pt.) This is 24 point

Small font is hard to read (12 pt.)

10pt is even worse
And we need binoculars for this one..

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Font Choice Using a font color that does not contrast with the background color is hard to read Using color for decoration is distracting and annoying. Using a different color for each point is unnecessary
Same for secondary points

Trying to be creative can also be bad

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Do not use graphics you apologize for

No-01-98 No-01-98 No-06-98 No-07-98 No-08-98 No-12-98 No-12-98 No-15-98 No-21-98 No-22-98 No-29-98 De-06-98 De-13-98 De-20-98 De-20-98 De-20-98 De-20-98 De-20-98 De-20-98 De-20-98 De-27-98 De-28-98 De-28-98 De-31-98 De-31-98 De-31-98 Ja-03-99 Ja-10-99 Ja-16-99 Ja-17-99 Ja-24-99 Ja-24-99 Ja-31-99 Fe-07-99 Fe-07-99 Fe-08-99 Fe-08-99 Fe-08-99

Allowance Barenaked Ladies CD Change for B- Game Vendong sales to Dad Allowance Hip Hop Hits Volume 2 CD 1/2 E ddie Bauer green sweater Allowance Vendong sales to Dad Allowance Allowance Allowance Allowance Allowance Gifts for AMK Shirt for Zach Earrings for Margaret Shirt for Mom 1/2 GAP Jeans Soccer Payment Allowance Christmas Gifts Batteries Ref to zach Ref $ to Andy Ref $ to Andy Allowance Allowance Zach's basketball shoes Allowance Allowance Money for Winter Dance Allowance Money for Date @ Damons, movie Allowance Andy pays for folders Andy pays for Sharpies Zach rec Long time ago Joystick and PC gamer sub.

$10. 00 ($12.00)

$10. 00 ($30.00) $82. 25 $10. 00

$2. 50

$2. 50

$10. 00 ($15.00) ($15.00) $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 ($45.00) ($20.00) ($12.00) ($20.00) ($20.00) ($100.00) $10. 00

$2. 50

$2. 50

$10. 00 $70. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00

$2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50

$2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50

$10. 00 ($60.00) ($20.00) $40. 00

$2. 50

$2. 50

$60. 00 $35. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 ($40.00) $10. 00 ($40.00) $10. 00 $2. 00 $8. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 ($35.00) $10. 00 $10. 00 $10. 00 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50 $2. 50

$10. 00

$2. 50

$2. 50

$74. 00 ($90.00)

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Charts and Graphs

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 North America Europe Austrailia

Mode A
Mode B Mode C

Dont copy from Excel

Arnab Bhattacharya VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Charts and Graphs

80 70
60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Mode A
Mode B
Mode C

North America
Arnab Bhattacharya

Europe

Australia

Better !

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Animations: Competing with PIXAR

Sometimes animation can go too far Use it only ONCE if really needed. There is a simple effect called appear Which doesnt do all the fancy stuff but usually works well for most stuff

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

FILE NOT FOUND

Microsoft PowerPoint is unable to open the requested file. This could be because your file is corrupted and/or this is an unsupported file type. Do you wish to retry or cancel?

Boot startup failure, press any key to reboot.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Remember Murphy
Something WILL go wrong- test your presentation beforehand Font, equations, videos

Always have a backup of your presentation on hand.

Be prepared to do the presentation without the PowerPoint.

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Spellcheek your work Its very irritating to see missspellings in presenations

Pay attention to grammar as well!

If there is a squiggly red line, take a look!

But dont blindly believe in spellcheckers
Revue it man you ally as soft wear is not smart!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Arnabs Tips - 1
NEVER read the title! (Paraphrase it)

Write down what you will say in the first minute Remember audience viewpoint
1. Why should I pay attention to you when I can think about more interesting things?

2. Now that I am listening, why should I care about this issue?

Connecting statement between slides There is always too much text

Arnab Bhattacharya VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Arnabs Tips - 2
Build in gaps where you can connect to your audience. Restore the human dimension to your presentation - make eye contact, smile, BREATHE! Insert a personal touch - anecdote/bit of humour Dont forget your first and most effective audio-visual tool yourself! Practice, have friend time your talk (individual slide timings
help)

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010

Thank you!

All the best for your presentation!

Arnab Bhattacharya

VSRP 2010 TIFR 02.07.2010