Paper Advice
Presentation Advice
- Start preparing your slides at least 2 weeks before the presentation
- Ask yourself who's your primary audience
- Assume you have to conquer your audience's interest
- Use the rule 1 slide - 1 minute to approximately design your presentation (if you have to prepare a 20-minute presentation, generally 40 slides are too much)
- Clarify as soon as possible the vocabulary and what the problem is
- Use examples
- Don't put a "outline slide" unless your outline is really different from the rest of flat computer science research outlines (Introduction, Background, Proposal, Results, Conclusion, Future work). You're wasting precious time.
- Use large (I said large) font. This will stem the temptation of putting tons of text in your slides
- Minimise the use of animations. Use overlays instead (they are much effective and clean).
- Use always the same stylistic notations (font type, font size, bullets type)
- Don't put too much text in the slides
- "If you bore your audience in the first few minutes you may never get them back" by Simon-Peyton-Jones (Microsoft)
- Don't read the slides
- Don't use any piece of paper: you have to know exactly what you are saying without any assistance.
- Don't stop every 3 minutes to drink
- Use a consistent graphic style (every slide must use the same style)
- Put the slide number on each slide (very important for questions [Eg. I want to ask a clarification about slide #34], or feedback from your research group [Eg. slide #34 sucks!])
- Prepare backup slides after the last one. You can use those slides to deep some aspects of your presentation if you have time or if you receive questions
- "Avoid the temptation to conceal problems you know about in your work" by Simon-Peython-Jones (Microsoft)
- Train yourself until you are very very confident and follow the time requirements
- Read this
Poster Advice
- Written advice on creating a academic poster: Link
- Same advice as above, but condensed and in picture form: Link