With con­fer­ence sea­son almost upon us, it is timely to dis­cuss what makes a good con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion.
Here is a sug­gested structure.

1. A motiv­i­tat­ing exam­ple demostrat­ing the prob­lem you are try­ing to solve.
2. Explain exist­ing approaches to the prob­lem and their weaknesses.
3. Describe your main contributions.
4. Show how your ideas solve the problem/example you started with.

That won’t nec­es­sar­ily work for every talk, but it is a good place to start. In par­tic­u­lar, begin­ning with a moti­vat­ing exam­ple is much bet­ter than set­ting up the prob­lem algebraically.

Fur­ther suggestions:

• Use beamer with this tem­plate.
• Use a max­i­mum of 20 slides for a 20 minute con­fer­ence presentation.
• Assume the audi­ence knows about what you did at the start of your research in this area. That is, prob­a­bly not much. You can assume stan­dard mate­r­ial taught to under­grad­u­ates (regres­sion, ARIMA mod­els, etc.), but don’t assume they already know what you have spent long hours learn­ing on your own.
• Give only the most nec­es­sary math­e­mat­i­cal details. Peo­ple do not quickly absorb math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions so don’t give any more than you have to. Never give proofs.
• When you do include some alge­bra, define all terms used. Why make the audi­ence guess?
• Use graphs instead of tables where possible.
• Where pos­si­ble, let the graph fill the slide. The com­mand \fullwidth{file} is useful.
• Use \begin{block}...\end{block} to high­light equa­tions or impor­tant information.
• Use \structure{...} to high­light head­ings on slides.
• Do not use equa­tion num­ber­ing, fig­ure num­ber­ing, etc. The lis­ten­ers can’t go back and see which one you are refer­ring to.
• At the bot­tom of the last slide, give your web­site or email address for peo­ple to con­tact you if they want to read the paper or down­load your R code.
• Go through all your slides and see what you can remove. Less text is better.
• Go through all your slides again and check that the titles are empha­siz­ing the right thing. Fix them where necessary.
• Go through all your slides again just to make sure you can’t see any­thing that could be improved.
• Read Jonathan Shewchuk’s advice on giv­ing an aca­d­e­mic talk.
• Prac­tise. Out loud. Stand­ing up. Using a data projector.

Using beamer

After you’ve done a pre­sen­ta­tion or two based on the tem­plate pro­vided above, you will prob­a­bly want to learn more about beamer and what it can do. A good place to start is the beamer quick­start tuto­r­ial. But even­tu­ally, you will have to knuckle down and read the beamer user guide. (OK, it is too long and rather com­pli­cated. But at least read some of it.)

Some of the above com­ments assume you have installed the Hytex theme from the monash.zip file as explained on my LaTeX page.

Tags: beamer, LaTeX, seminars