CS 574: Presentations

Each student in this class will be required to present one paper to the class. The papers will be presented in the order students appear on my class list; the presentation calendar is here.

The goal of the presentation is to give a clear description of the main topics in the paper, and to lead a classroom discussion on the paper's content. The goal is that everyone will come away with a clearer understanding of the material in the paper as a result of the discussion.

Your presentation will be graded on a ten point scale. The criteria will be (equally weighted):

• Clarity: how clearly do you present the material?
• Content: how completely do you cover the material?
• Organization: how well is your presentation organized?
• Grasp: how well do you appear to understand the material you are presenting?
• Visual: how much do your visual aids assist your presentation?

Your presentation should be timed to take one class period (fifty minutes). In general, you will need to pick and choose the most important concepts from the paper to present; attempting to recite the entire paper to the class (a) gives no value-added from the presentation, and (b) will normally take much longer than the available time.

Also, your presentation may not use an overhead or LCD projector (i.e. no PowerPoint). The reason for this requirement is to facilitate a greater give-and-take during presentations. Using PowerPoint makes it difficult to break the flow of the presentation for questions, and makes it much to easy to use figures from papers without fully understanding them.

Last modified: Wed Sep 13 08:20:45 MDT 2006