Our weekly group meetings serve as a vehicle to keep all group members abreast of research progress within the group and throughout the research community. Doing this well is an important part of your continuing education, and will form an important backbone the technical breadth of your education. Group meetings consist of brief progress report provide weekly updates of status, and a longer presentation which consists of an in-depth look into some work done within the group or another research project. These longer presentations and discussion are a critical part of learning how to think about and present research. Think of them as analysis and critiques of research projects. We focus on the steps involved in giving a group meeting presentation.
Step 1: Selecting a paper to present (start at least 1 week before your presentation)
Because we have only a limited number of presentation slots, and each presentation consumes the time of numerous group members, it's important to select good papers on relevant topics. In general, you should find a paper you think is good, and presents some interesting problems or ideas which will lead to relevant discussions. In general papers will be directly relevant to a project ongoing in the group, but occasionally topics and papers are so interesting, we will have a presentation in an unrelated area. Here are some good ways to find excellent papers:
In general, you should choose papers that you will enthusiastically advocate the contribution of the paper. Good papers and good presentations lead to profitable discussion. Bad papers generally lead to unprofitable discussion. These papers should be in topic areas relevant to one of the current group projects, and ideally are approachable by the rest of the group. If the papers are not approachable, then the burden is on the presenter to give the relevant background and perspective, as well as describing the contribution of the work.
Step 2: Making the Paper available (no less than 3 days before the meeting)
Well in advance of the meeting, you should make the paper available to the group. It is essential to get the paper to people early, as this will allow them to think about it in detail, and also to schedule their time so that they can find time to read it thoroughly. In an email, notify the group of the title, authors, place of publication, and where they can get the paper. The paper should be put into the group meeting archive (currently on Sill) with appropriate entry in the indices at the time the announcement is made. Of course, if we only have paper copies of the paper, earlier notification is appropriate.
Step 3: Preparing your presentation
You should make a serious attempt to give a GREAT TALK at the group meeting. First, giving public talks like this are an important professional skill, so you should take advantage of the opportunity to have an audience and practice. Second, you're expending the time of the entire group (1 hour x N members), so you should make sure this time is spent as effectively as possible. Third, your colleagues are forming opinions of you which will affect your long term associations. Whenever you make a presentation like this of yourself, you should want to excel. Fourth, you're presumably presenting research in your area, and you should want your colleagues to think of your area as exciting and important. Finally, with the group size we have, you will give no more than 3 or 4 group meeting presentations in a year. Thus, a significant effort is justified. More specifically, you should design your talk to meet the following goals:
It's important to work at the stylistic elements of your presentation.
For example, 'wordy' slides are uninteresting -- especially if the presenter reads it to the audience.
Try to figure out what are the "neat picture" which capture the key
concepts, build intuition, etc. The basic principle here is to present
things simply and clearly, so that the audience can grasp the major ideas.
Make sure that you deliver the key points, and highlight the few things that an
audience can absorb in a single sitting. Don't read your slides... the
text on the slides should serve as a reminder to you what point you wanted to
make. The bullets need not contain the entire point.
To prepare, practice the talk several times before presenting. this allows you to organize what you'll say during the talk, and identify where a figure or example would be most useful. You can do this by yourself, or with an audience (perhaps a peer, your spouse, or even just by yourself). When you practice, make sure to speak every word you intend to say during your talk, this avoids the pitfall of thinking that you had it clear, when in fact you didn't.
And of course, a goal of any talk is to get the audience EXCITED and involved with the topic. The onus is on the speaker to make the audience care! The talk should be planned for 30 minutes (and likely run about 60 minutes with discussion). The first few times you give a group meeting talk, you should ask Andrew to review your slides a few days in advance and talk with you about how the talk can be improved.
Step 4: Learning from your experience
After you've given the talk, go back and assess how well you did in meeting the goals set out above.
This assessment should involve soliciting opinions from members of the group, Andrew, and self-reflection on the process. Writing down some notes on how to improve for next time, and referring to them when you next give a presentation is a useful practice.
Note: another type of group meeting talk is a conference practice talk, or a "tutorial" talk on an area of general interest in which you've acquired some expertise. These talks have slightly different characteristics, but also many similarities to the general group meeting talk discussed above.