Presentation of Scientific Results

1
Presentation of Scientific Results

• Marek Seliger
• Lecture and seminar
• 3rd lecture Talk
• how to prepare a scientific talk
• yet another try to squeeze something really
  complex into a cooking recipe
• (based on slides by Jaroslav Fabian and Bonnie
  Dorr)
• physik.kfunigraz.ac.at/sel/teaching

2
Outline

• an example
• main points
• talk preparation
• transparencies
• presentation
• a few rules to remember

3
Giving a Good Talk Its important!

• More people will see your talks than will read
  your papers
• The audience will form their impressions of you
  based on your talks
• Early in career, treat every talk like an
  interview talk
• Start as early as you can

4
An Example

• The speaker approaches the head of the room and
  sits down at the table. (You can't see him
  through the heads in front of you.)
• He begins to read from a paper, speaking in a
  soft monotone. (You can hardly hear. Soon you're
  nodding off.)
• Sentences are long, complex, and filled with
  jargon.The speaker emphasizes complicated
  details. (You rapidly lose the thread of the
  talk.)
• With five minutes left in the session, the
  speaker suddenly looks at his watch. He announces
  -- in apparent surprise -- that he'll have to
  omit the most important points because time is
  running out. He shuffles papers, becoming nervous
  and confused.(You do too, if you're still
  awake.)
• He drones on. Fifteen minutes after the scheduled
  end of the talk, the chairman reminds the speaker
  to finish for the third time. The speaker trails
  off inconclusively and asks for questions.
  (Thin, polite applause finally rouses you from
  dreamland.)

5
Whats wrong with this picture?

• Reading
• Sitting
• No visual aids
• Small print, busy slides
• No moving about
• Monotone
• Mumbling
• Facing downward
• Lost in details
• Running overtime
• No conclusion
• Ignoring audience

Talk
Stand
Diagrams, graphs
Large print
Move
Vary pitch
Speak loudly/clearly
Eye contact
Focus on main points
Finish on time
Summarize, conclude
Respond to audience
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General Preparation

• Know what your surroundings will be like size of
  room, microphone, equipment, etc.
• Know your audience andtune your message to that
  audience
• Get to the pointearly and often
• Organize your slides so that they effectively
  deliver your central message
• Answer questions skillfully

7
Where are you presenting?Who is your audience?
8
Know your Audience

• One of the biggest mistakes speakers makeis not
  knowing their audience!
• Will your audience include
• Specialists
• in your sub-field?
• In your field?
• Faculty and postdoctoral researchers?
• Graduate students?
• Undergraduates?

9
Know your Audience
What is the level?

• general public
• undergrads
• grads, experts
• friends

Response Imagine yourself in their shoes and
adjust your talk (especially the length of the
introduction)to be comprehensible to an average
person in the level.Then make your talk still
simpler. KISS keap it simple and stupid
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What is the intensity?
intensity size x aggressiveness
size/friendliness
size
friendliness

• 0
• 2-5
• 5-20
• 20-50
• 51-100000

• Cheesy
• Polite-friendly
• Polite-ironic
• aggressive

Response Adjust your voice, question allowance,
and friendliness. Mind the cultural differences.
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What is the phase?

• coherent
• all asleep or all listening
• incoherent (no phase can be defined)
• frequent disturbances
• snoring
• shouting
• candy unwrapping
• door slamming

Response you are the master of ceremony Adjust
your level of excitement, lock the door
12
Keep the audience engaged

• 20 or more of the audience is thinking about
  something else.
• Use examples, analogies, and exceptions.
• Use verbal punctuation.
• Ask real and rhetorical questions to keep people
  awake.
• Suggest simple experiment with unexpected result.
• Point at board/screen a lot.
• Be with the people
• look people in the eye and
• walk toward and away from the audience.

13
How might I annoy my audience?

• Thou shall not be interested
• Thou shall not waste space
• Thou shall not be brief
• Thou shall not write large
• Thou shall not use color
• Thou shall not illustrate
• Thou shall not make eye contact
• Thou shall not skip slides in a long talk
• Thou shall not practice

David Patterson, circa 1983
14
Talk Preparation
how to sift one year worth of research into a
short presentation solution focus on the main
point
15
General Structure

• title
• contents / outline
• introduction / background
• body / main part
• summary conclusions

16
Slide Organization

• Sample outline of a research talk
• Title slide credit to co-authors and funding
  agencies
• Up-front carrot (attention-getter)
• Outline (unless short 10-15 min talk)
• Background material
• What you did
• new ideas, algorithm, theorem, proof, methods
• Why is it important
• results
• contribution
• Summary, conclusion and future work

17
Delivering the central message

• What did you do? Why is it important?
• Whats the one-sentence summary of your talk that
  the audience should walk away with?
• Tune your message to your audience
• Repeat the message over and over again throughout
  the talk
• Tell them what you will tell them
• Tell them
• Tell them what you have told them
• Keep the content of the talk focused on the
  central message

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Conference talk

• Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)
• Forecast (1 slide)
• Outline (1 slide)
• Background
• Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides)
• Related Work (0-1 slides)
• Methods (1 slide)
• Results (4-6 slides)
• Summary (1 slide)
• Future Work (0-1 slides)
• Backup Slides

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Academic Interview

• Take a 20-minute conference talk.
• Expand the 5 minute intro to 20 minutes
• Do the rest of the conference talk,minus the
  summary and future work.
• Add 10 minutes of deeper stuff from your thesis.
• Do the summary and future work from the
  conference talk in a manner accessible to all.
• Add 10 ten minutes to survey all the other stuff
  you have done (to show your breadth).
• Save 5 minutes for questions(to show that you
  are organized).

20
Formal Lecture

• The menu
• Attract attention, get people quiet
• Start by putting up an outline
• Never start with a joke
• The appetizer
• Present a carrot immediately and be excited
• Focus on central, exciting concept
• The main dish
• Cycle over difficult ideas
• One paragraph overview
• Example
• Keep audience engaged
• Put demos at the end
• The dessert
• Dont run over and stop when done!

21
Time the TalkIntrinsic timing

• 10 min. talks
• 1 min. title
• 9 min. body
• 2 min. questions
• 30-60 min. talks
• 1 min. title
• 5-20 min. introduction (20-30 of
  talk)
• fill in body
• 2-4 min. conclusions
• 5-10 min. questions

From J. Garland
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Extrinsic timing better less than more
allow circa 2-3 minutes per slide
Measure your personal slide/minute speed

• 5-8 slides for 10 min. talks
• 12-20 slides for 30 min. talks
• 20-30 slides for 45-60 min. talks

23
Title page (unless you are well known to the
audience)

• Title of the talk
• Name, Institution
• Collaborators
• Acknowledgements (grants, etc. )
• An informal picture helps to catch attention from
  the start

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Title page example
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Introduction
Put your talk into a broader context
Why should the audience listen? Why is your work
interesting? Why is it important? Think BIG
PICTURE! Emphasize an application. What makes it
a hard problem? Why should people care?
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The Importance of Background KnowledgeCycle of
Scientific Working

• learn study
• develop interest
• discuss
• idea
• work on problem
• solution
• filter results
• presentation
• discussion
• new input
• feedback

key role of background knowledge
key role of presentation
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Background Material

• minimize background material
• at least 2/3 of talk should be original work
• describe motivating applications that will later
  tie into your results
• identify those who have done related work and
  spell their names correctly!hint people love to
  hear their own names.

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What you did

• emphasize your simple message repeatedly
• back it up with details of experiment and theory
• use pictures and diagrams as much as possible
  instead of wordy explanation
• keep notation to a minimum
• avoid too many abbreviations
• never use equation numbers
• repeat the equation if necessary
• illustrate your points via simple examples

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Body of the Presentation

• reasonably organized
• easy to follow---accompany speech
• colorful
• plenty illustrations
• equations to a minimum
• main physical points stressed
• do not overcrowd, audience tend to read
  everything on the screen

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How do you present an algorithm?
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(No Transcript)
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Summary and Future Work

• repeat what you did
• repeat why it is important
• future work is important because it shows you are
  thinking beyond your thesis problem
• include contact info at the end
• email, web page

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Preparation of Transparencies
Transparencies are no more and no less than an
accompaniment to the oral presentation. They
shall not be a reading board, nor a decoration to
your speech. At any rate, they should be readable.
34
Software tools

• hand-aided
• transparencies

computer-aided PowerPoint, LaTeX
mixed hand-scan-computer-aided (HASCA)
35
Hand-aided transparencies
Personal art of scientific presentation

• Pros
• Versatile personality exposed, cheerful
• Reasonably colorful
• Relevant points natural
• (much effort needed for overdoing)
• Easy add-ons at talk
• Works virtually everywhere
• Light to carry
• No power, AC convertors needed to review
• If left in a Cafe, most likely found there next
  day

36
Hand-aided transparencies
Personal art of scientific presentation

• Cons
• Personality exposed
• No modifications (except add-ons)
• Low resolution
• No templates available
• Graph print-out/Xerox time consuming, expensive
• Frequently blown away by projector fans
• Finger-printing, yellowing
• Question Could you show again the slide where
  ...?
• invites for a desparate search.

37
Computer Aided Presentations

• Pros
• Flexible, portable
• Insertions of portable graphics (png, jpg, gif)
• Great resolution
• Templates available (Scientific presentations for
  dummies)
• Easy changes, spellchecking
• Visual, sound (the symphony effect possible)
• Easy orientation for question session

38
Computer Aided Presentations

• Cons
• Personality lost (uniformity, business-like,
  boring)
• Bullets, bullets, bullets ... (bulletproof is
  illusion)
• Border between HA slides and reading a paper
• Long warm-up phase, disruptive to sessions
• (5-100000 minutes wiring, technology, Mac)
• Problems with postscript graphics inclusion
• Overdoing (equations, indexes) relevance lost
• Heavy (notebooks comes to about 3 kg)
• Try leaving your notebook for a moment in a Cafe

39
HASCA example
Three requirements of spintronics
Efficient spin injection
Slow spin relaxation
Reliable spin detection
by J. Fabian
40
Tables and Figures

• Tables
• dont make font too small
• use color for emphasis
• Figures
• be sure axes are clearly labeled
• use color to differentiate lines
• dont just copy verbatim out of a paper!

41
Be Qualitative

• Physics is an exact science whose pleasure
  derives from qualitative understanding.
• It will turn out, as we go to more and more
  advanced physics, that many simple things can be
  deduced mathematically more rapidly than they can
  be really understood in a fundamental or simple
  sense.
• Richard Feynman while discussing spinning
  tops in his Lecture notes
• Give simple physical pictures and graphs.
• Keep formulas simple, without unnecessary
  indices, essentially giving the main trends
  (energy goes as 1/L2)
• Give tables only when necessary (comparison of
  theory and experiment), use graphs instead

42
Keep PANDORAS box closed
Do not talk about things you have only a faint
idea about. You think you will look educated, but
bet that there will be someone in the audience
asking a question about it and you will be
embarrassed and say Ooops, I am actually not an
expert on that, sorry. You should be in full
command over your slides.
43
An actual account of Pandoras box

• speaker cites from the slide
• Everyone must rediscover quantum
  mechanics for himself
• 
  
  Wagner
• audience Who is Wagner?
• speaker I do not know but he must be a well
• 
  known physicist
• audience Do you actually mean Wigner?
• speaker Could be

44
Give Proper Credit

• Display acknowledgements to you coworkers
• and to your funding agencies
• Give credit to relevant previous work and
• mention concurent efforts by others.
• Cite the sources of the pictures that you borrow
• or you are inspired by
• Neglecting the above opens Pandoras box.

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Anticipate Questions

• You appear competent when you know how
• to answer questions.
• Be honest if you do not know the answer
• This is an interesting question, but I would
  need more time
• to think about an answer.
• A very good question. We are currently working
  on a related
• problem so if you come to my next talk in
  2020 I will let you know.
• I should have thought about that, this is very
  good.
• Honestly I do not know the answer. But you
  appear to know more
• than I do on this issue so I would be
  interested in talking to you
• after the session
• I am not familiar with that work of Prof.
  Einstein so I cannot
• comment on it

46
Physics Today, 45, July 1991
47
Practice

• Even experience speakers
• do practice
• Talk at your group meeting or
• alone at home
• Pay attention to timing,
• smoothness of the transitions
• between slides

48
Enjoy the Talk

• You should be excited that your research is in a
  stage that your results can be communicated and
  disseminated
• You should be excited that you have an
  opportunity to present your ideas to a broader
  audience
• You should be excited that people actually listen
  to you (on their free will or not)
• Try to relax. It is natural to be a little
  stressed, especially at the start

49
10 Rules in brief

• Know the audience
• Time the talk
• Be qualitative
• Engage the audience
• Keep Pandoras box closed
• Give proper credit
• Anticipate questions
• Practice
• Develop your own style
• Enjoy the talk

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Further Rules 11-14

• If appropriate, begin by thanking the organizers
• for invitation or opportunity to present your
  recent
• work
• End by Thank you for your attention which to
  some
• is an alarm clock and to others may be a
  clear-cut
• way that the talk is really over
• Reading from a slide occasionally is OK,
  especially
• when citing
• Dress appropriately (since physicists do not
  appear
• to be fashion fans, this rule is not strict
  just be
• comfortable while socially acceptable)

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Further Rules 15-...

• If asked a question, repeat it if you feel some
  may not hear it (especially if you have a
  microphone)
• Prepare technical aspects of the talk (notebook
• connection, booting) a few minutes before the
  talk
• Make sure that all can see the whole screen, and
  that you are no obstacle for the view.
• Point to the screen, not to the projector!

52
Take-Home Messages

• Know your audience
• Create a simple message and repeat it several
  times
• Allow plenty of time to prepare your talk
• Practice!
• Dont block the slides during the talk
• Speak slowly clearly
• Dont run over on time
• Have fun and learn from your mistakes

Thank you for your attention!