How to give a technical talk

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How to give a technical talk

• Brian F. Cooper

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Overview

• What to cover
• Keep the audience engaged
• Be organized
• Be flexible
• PowerPoint!
• Practice

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What is a talk?

• A way to communicate your ideas to others
• An advertisement for your paper
• A way to make a good impression on the community

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Types of talks

• Seminars
• Internal
• External
• Conference presentations
• Defenses
• Sales pitches
• Teaching
• Funding review

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Scope of a talk

• Should you cover everything you did?
• No!
• Focus on 2-3 key points
• Better than trying to (badly) cover 5-10 things
• Should you go completely in depth?
• No!
• Give enough detail so that people believe you
• More details are available in the paper

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Keep the audience engaged
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Keep the audience engaged

• Just because it is a technical talk does not mean
  it has to be boring
• Hopefully you are excited about this stuff
• Let it show

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Keep the audience engaged

• Do
• Use lots of pictures
• Repeat and emphasize important points
• Know your audience and target your talk
• Use good public speaking tactics
• Dont
• Have dense text or figures
• Have lots of complex equations
• Depending of course on the venue

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Be organized

• Divide talk into coherent pieces
• Give overview of talk
• Have the information you need

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Be flexible

• Be prepared to answer questions
• Be prepared to drop slides
• Be prepared to go more/less in depth

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Animation the great debate

• Powerpoint is like a drug
• Its easy to get addicted to the pretty colors
• The first one is free
• But the audience will get annoyed after too much

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Animation the great debate

• Powerpoint is like a drug
• Its easy to get addicted to the pretty colors
• The first one is free
• But the audience will get annoyed after too much

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Animation the great debate

• Use animation to
• Illustrate complex concepts
• Engage the audience
• But watch out for
• Excessive, distracting animations
• Animation that interrupts your flow
• Malfunctioning animation

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SynthMap Algorithm

• Build random query-document map
• Hill-climb to minimize badness
• Build random document-peer map
• Hill-climb to minimize badness

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Other PowerPoint gotchas

• Watch out for the PowerPoint surprise
• Watch out for color/
• template/font issues
• Make it clear and
• easy to see
• Dont be chained to
• your slides

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Make it clear
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Make it clear
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Practice!

• Give a practice talk
• Including a skeptical audience
• Time your talk
• Your talk should sound like you are speaking
  about what you know
• Not what youve memorized

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Give your contact information

• cooperb_at_cc.gatech.edu
• www.cc.gatech.edu/cooperb/