Tips for Effective Academic Presentations

“A research talk gives you access to the world's most precious commodity: the time and attention of other people. Don't waste it.”

Here are my top 2⁴ tips for effective academic presentations:

1. Edit your slides the night before the talk. Even if the talk is 99% ready (and many times it really isn't...) spend an hour polishing things and making slight changes. It will refresh the talks in your mind.
2. Start well: Start with a title slide and remember to present yourself. “Hello, I am [name] and today I'll be talking about the [conference] paper [papername]” or some variant of this.
3. Script the first minute: Consider writing and memorizing an actual script for your first 2-3 slides, and practicing it a couple of times. Low effort and I find that it really helps me find my pacing, avoid mistakes and ease the nerves of speaking before an audience. If your first 2-3 slides flow well, everything else will follow.
4. Do not memorize an exact script for the rest of the talk: we can immediately tell, and it's a turn off. Leave room to be spontaneous.
5. Avoid "meta" talk: don't talk about your talk, definitely don't talk about your slides.
6. No overview slide! You only have 25 minutes to make your point. In fact, most people will disengage after 3 minutes (!) unless you give them a reason not to. Don't waste time.
7. Think about your audience: Who are they? What do they know, and not know? What do they remember from the first weeks of class? Briefly remind or teach to the audience of key concepts/ideas that you need. Examples: “Remember that sometimes we want to combine nearest neighbour queries with a predicate filter”, “Unlike old style drives, SSDs can do fast reads from anywhere on disk – there is no seek time”, "the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma allows us to reduce vector lengths with only a small effect on its length“; "Unlike hard drives that have a mechanical head, SSDs can read from multiple places on the disk in parallel”.
8. No reading slides: Do not just stand there like an announcer reading your slides out loud. Ever. The slides are supposed to be a compressed version, or to provide helpful visuals, as you talk and elaborate.
9. Reduce ink and text: Don't put too much text on a slide. Ruthlessly trim the text - if people are reading, they aren't listening. You don't need to be grammatically correct in a bullet point.
10. Be prepared to skip slides. Speakers always run out of time near the end. Always plan ahead and know which slides you will skip in "real time".
11. Leave enough time for results and for questions. Remember to leave enough time at the end of the talk so you can present results but also to answer questions. It's easy to get caught up in explaining the technical ideas and cool details, but results are also important.
12. Practice the talk, and time it! Even a single rehearsal run will make your talk much smoother, guaranteed! If you can't find a willing victi- friend to give the talk to, just practice on your own with a timer. It will help.
13. Manage audience questions and control the flow of the talk. The audience might interrupt you with questions (good!) but some can insistent and derail the talk (not so good). Learn to (a) listen and answer the questions, but also (b) to manage your time and not getting stuck. Learn how to politely but firmly get back on track with your talk. This is a skill you learn with experience. Try: "Let's take this offline", "Let me get back to you with an answer", "Let's leave this question to end of the talk", "Good question! I'll get to this in a few minutes" and so on. You combine this with your preparation to skip slides and still finish on time.
14. A short talk is focused: You do not have time to convey everything. Focus on key points, and only do one or two technical deep dives into parts of the method - no more!
15. Explain figures: When showing a graph of results, make sure that the audience knows what it means. Usually you should talk about each axis represent. “This graph shows performance of the index. The X axis shows queries per second, and the Y axis shows the recall. The more to the top-right, the better”.
16. Thank the audience at the end. They have given you their time and attention, some are ready with questions (or perhaps already asked them). Thank them at the end. "Thank you for listening! I am happy to answer any questions"

I strongly recommend this 1h talk from Simon Peyton Jones about how to give a great research talk. I cannot force you to watch it, but would if I could 😃 Not everything in his talk is directly applicable for our seminar, but most of it does and it's wonderful advice.

Here are some ways for presenting complex figures when giving your talk.

In the end, remember there is no perfect talk. Not only that, you don't need to be perfect for successful delivery. If you managed to convey the key points to most of the audience - that's already success! Consider this seminar presentation as a chance to practice the skills for the more important presentations that you will do in your future.