Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Instructions for Presenters

As the discussion series has progressed, our goals for the presentations have evolved. In addition to generating discussion among researchers, we have come to recognize the value of the series as a means to refine our presentation skills. In light of this, here are some guidelines for creating your presentation:

  • When preparing your presentation, view this as a normal conference talk and prepare accordingly.
  • Please prepare a short (20-30 minute) talk or a long (45 minute) talk according to the time slot the organizer has reserved.
  • You should assume that the audience is knowledgeable in IR and many of the techniques commonly used in the field. Unless the purpose of your talk is a general overview of a research problem, you should assume that the related research can be covered very briefly (one or two slides).
  • Focus on presenting your thoughts, issues, and contributions to the problem at hand.
  • If you have extra material that won't fit in the talk, prepare slides for them as it is very likely that we will be willing to hear more about the subject after the main talk is over.
  • Please don't be afraid to present work in progress. Even with the change of presentation format to conference talk style , we are still driven by our original goals of learning about current research and fostering collaboration on work in progress.

Thanks are due to Yiming Yang for some helpful suggestions.