Presentations
Overview
Conference presentations are hard. Your goal is to take months of progress and distill them into 15 minutes. This includes not only introducing the novelty and your results, but also the context needed to appreciate them.
Rather than trying to do it all, I recommend instead thinking of presentations as a sales pitch for your paper. It may not include all of the details, but it should get the most important ideas across in a memorable and easily digestible fashion. Once people are hooked, then they will return to the paper for details.
This page provides guidelines for developing your presentation, some examples, and resources for speeding up your preparation.
Guidelines
Content
Rule #1: Don't Compete with Your Slides!
Humans are not good at multi-tasking. People can read OR listen --- not both. As such, if you have too many words or bullets on your slide, you'll lose your audience. As a result, you are strongly encouraged to limit the amount of text on your slides. A sentence or two is fine, as are brief text elements clarifying data on a plot, but not much more.
As a rule, you can use text to convey the big picture, but leave the details for your commentary or a back-up slide.
If text is unavoidable, be sure to provide that text sequentially so it doesn't overwhelm the audience.
Rule #2: Figures are Your Friends
Figures and diagrams are the most useful tool when crafting presentations. Visuals have the benefit of being enormously flexible, while remaining information dense if done well.
I recommend having at least one visual element on every slide. These can be figures included in your paper (or not!). If you find yourself in need of a certain visualization that would help explain an idea, go and generate it! It becomes great fodder for the full journal article.
Rule #3: Organize Your Content Hierarchically
A single slide can contain more than one idea. When this is the case, it can be helpful to draw literal boundaries between your ideas. These boundaries provide a visual hierarchy for your audience. Rather than being bombarded with 10 elements that need to be individually inspected, bounding boxes / containers relay to the audience that there are really only 3 or 4 ideas that will be discussed. The individual elements are just decoration on the larger themes.
If you choose to use shapes to provide these boundaries, then please use the rounded rectangle. I know it seems silly, but they make slides more approachable --- aiding with the overall "sales-pitch" goal. Similarly, it's often beneficial to any figures / plots with the rounded rectangle shape via Mask with Rounded Rectangle.
Rule #4: No "Questions" Slide
A "Questions?" slide is wasted opportunity. Instead, your slide deck should end with the (1) most important takeaways and figures from your presentation and (2) contact information. By putting the important content at the end, you are helping to kick-start a conversation or questions by reminding your audience of the most interesting bits without having to remember slide numbers.
Caveat
Note that it is okay to put a small text box at the very bottom of this summary slide that says "Questions?" just to indicate that this is the end of your presentation. I often do it as a pop-up.
Styling
Templates
To keep branding consistent across the lab, please use one of the two following template files.
Please use the default colors / shape styles wherever possible. If you have recommendations on how to improve these templates, please share!
Scientific Figures
There is no greater academic sin than a grainy figure. As such, all figures should be EXPORTED AS VECTOR GRAPHICS (.svg or .pdf). This can be accomplished by changing your matplotlib stylesheet to compile with LaTeX via plt.rc.params('use_tex', True). You can also use the style sheet on mldsml which supports both light and dark mode scientific rendering.
When you developing your visualizations, be sure to specify figure sizes with the exact desired dimensions as will be used in the paper (e.g. plt.figsize(6.5,3) will horizontally span the entire page via 8.5in minus 1 inch margins), and keep your text elements >8pt font for legibility.
Concept Figures
Concept figures can be created with powerpoint or Inkscape. Note that Powerpoint and Keynote both have a collection of icons and simple shapes that can get you far in these figures. You're encouraged to keep a file that contains all any simple composed scenes for importing in future presentations (e.g. simple spacecraft, neural network, simple asteroid, etc).
Equations
Never use screenshots for equations. Keynote has a built in LaTeX equation editor via Cmd+Shift+E. If you need to transcribe something especially gnarly, you can use MathPix's free tier to convert automatically.
Powerpoint also has a way to natively render LaTeX equations, albeit its less straightforward. When you insert an equation, you can type the LaTeX command, right click and select "Make professional". Alternatively, you can install the IguanaTeX add on for similar functionality to Keynote.
Fonts
It is a bad idea to change the default font in a presentation file. Not all computers have access to the same fonts (even if you export as a PDF!). If a font family cannot be loaded, you'll get the weird symbols or rendering artifacts because the text gets converted to a different text with different size / space requirements. This can put you in an awkward position with missing information and ugly slides.
If you do need to change the fonts, then be sure that you can explicitly embed the font into the saved file. In Powerpoint this is done by going in Preferences -> Save -> Font Embedding -> Embed only the characters in the File. In Keynote there is not a way to do this.
Animations / Movies
Assume you cannot show animations. In most cases, conferences require uploading slides as a PDF, thereby removing all animations from the slide deck. If you do need to "animate content" it's recommended that you duplicate slides and have things pop in / out manually.
If the conference allows uploading Powerpoint files, the same advice stands. Assume that the animations will break or the computer will be slow. Your presentation needs to be robust to these pitfalls. A good way to ensure this is the case is to rehearse your deck without any animations. Only once it's fully rehearsed and you're confident that you can go without them, should you consider adding them in.
In the rare cases that your presentation would benefit from animations, then I recommend use of Keynote's "Magic Move" feature or Powerpoint's "Morph" feature, which allows you to seamlessly evolve elements from the current slide onto the next slide (assuming duplication). This can help you connect ideas without requiring you to manually gesture or point. If you go this route, be sure to keep the transition times short (e.g. ≤ 1 second). The presentation should be the slide contents, not how they move.
Rehearsal
You know that you've rehearsed enough when you can give the entire presentation from memory without looking at the slides in the allotted time frame. I find this typically takes 10-15 full runs. This seems excessive, but I promise it is worth the effort. It affords you flexibility to be think while presenting, as you've offloaded the work of having to conjure the right words in the adrenaline filled moment.
To hold yourself accountable, record a video of yourself giving the talk, and don't allow yourself to quit when something goes wrong. Everyone has a blunder when giving a live presentation, so its worth practicing that way and being able to recover even at awkward moments. If there are spots that you consistently struggle with, write down the exact phrase you want to use and rehearse it directly, and then with the surrounding content. After a few times it will get baked in.
Assume that your talk will be attended by approximately 100 people. Get in that headspace when you rehearse, feel the nerves / excitement, and practice!
Recording
It is expected that you record a video of your talk so we can include it on the MLDS youtube page. To do this, please use zoom and record to your computer. Once recorded, please trim out the beginning and end sections when you are getting the presentation ready and ending the recording.
Positioning Self View Window
I encourage you to move your self view window to a different monitor so you don't constantly look at yourself as you record. This has the added benefit of ensuring the self-view does not cover part of the slides in the recording, but instead appears adjacent to the slides.
Tips
Keyboard Shortcuts
There are a few shortcuts that you should learn or create in your presentation software of choice. These include:
- Move to Front
- Move to Back
- Group
- Ungroup
- Insert rounded rectangle
- Mask with rounded rectangle
- Left, Right, and Center Align
Some of these are already defined, others can be mapped to a keystroke or mouse input as desired. On Mac you can create custom commands in Settings->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts -> Applications -> Keynote OR Powerpoint -> "Insert -> Shape -> Rounded Rectangle" (or something like this). The earlier you make and use these shortcuts the longer you have to reap the rewards.
Points of Reference
It's a bit egocentric, but you can reference some of my old conference presentations to get an idea as to how I did them. My style has evolved a fair amount since these, but it at least gives a point of reference:
Additional Slides
