Presentation Tips
27 Feb 2008: Slides for my talk titled Communicating Your Research
Why Give Presentations
I will let Seth Godin answer that question in the following video:
(You only need to watch the first 5 minutes to get the message and the presentation style)
The main point of his talk is “Ideas that spread, win.” Its very important to spread our research ideas through talks and papers for it to becomes useful to the research community. A presentation is like an advertisement of a product. A good advertisement will make people read your work and incorporate important ideas in theirs.
Some useful links
- How to give a good research talk by Simon Peyton Jones of Microsoft Research.
- Garr Reynolds’s example of a good Powerpoint design
- Garr Reynolds’s “Presentation Zen”
- Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule (skip to “10. Follow the 10/20/30 Rule” at Time 38:28 into the talk). A recipe for a good talk 10 slides – 20 minutes – 30 as the minimum font size
The Low Standards
Giving technical presentations is an excellent way to get the word out about your research. However, most technical presentations are boring. The bar for decent presentations is so low that it is not very difficult to develop some skills and get noticed. In the following video, comedian Don McMillan shows exactly why most of the slides are bad!
A Good Speaker
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is an exception. He is somewhat of a cult-figure when it comes to giving excellent presentations. Here is a video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPod for the first time, in 2001: