Some Simple Tips for Making Paper Presentations 


Jinwei Gu
Jan. 24, 2008



Below are some simple tips that I found useful for making paper
presentations. They are NOT rules. It is just my personal experience.
You probably already know them. I put them here for your reference and
hope they are helpful for you.  You are free to use your creativity and
imagination to create your own presentation. Any suggestions/comments
are welcome. I will keep it updated so that everybody can share your
tips as well.


Usually, this kind of paper presentation takes substantial amount of
time to make. You need time to read and understand the paper, prepare
materials (images/videos/demos/...) and make slides, rehearse your
presentation, and so on. After you indeed go through the whole process,
you will find it is actually worth the effort.



1. Typical Format for Slides
===========================================


A. What is the paper about? (The problem) Why it is important to us?


B. What are the previous works? What is the key novelty of this paper?


C. What is algorithm/procedure/method of this paper to solve the
problem? List the steps, and the important assumptions. If you can find
some intermediate results (from the paper or web), put them here. 


D. What are the main results? 


E. Conclusion. What do you think about this paper? Is there anything to
improve? Is there any drawback of the proposed method?



2. Where to find materials?
===========================

Most of our presentations will be about vision and graphics. Usually the
authors of these papers will be happy to put their results (images,
videos, and other supplementary materials) on their homepages or
project pages. This is the primary source besides the paper itself. 


Also try to google search with the keywords from the paper title. You
might find similar projects, or tutorials/survey about this topic. There
are good stuff there too.


Finally, look at the reference section in the original paper.



3. Some Tips
===============


Do NOT just copy and paste paragraphs of text to the slides. Nobody
is willing to read the whole paper in classroom.


Please use images/videos/sketches as possible as you can. Let us face it, 
pure text and equations are just boring. If we must use equations, try
to use only those important and simple equations.


Please rehearse your presentation, at least twice after you finish the
slides. This is especially important if you are not a native English
speaker.