How to Prepare for the Technical Presentation?: A Short Lecture at a Conference

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While people around me realize how fun attending a conference is, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, I also found that not “everyone” can truly enjoy such an academic event. It’s mainly because they are new to this type of activity and are nervous about making a good impression. Yes, conferences are indeed the best place to advertise your work to everyone who could hire you. In particular, if you happen to give a cool presentation, that will be a big plus.

I thought sharing my thoughts might help students and early-career researchers who are not used to giving a presentation, or anybody who wants to improve their presentation. I am sure there are even more experienced people who can give more insightful advice, but let me just try to do my part because different perspectives are always good for this kind of matter: something that needs subjective evaluation to measure the quality.

Since my first conference, Interspeech 2004, I have run into many good and bad presentations. More importantly, I, as a presenter, have tried to improve my presentation over the years, and I know this journey never ends… I have been jealous of natural-born good presenters; they might not need this kind of advice. But, I wasn’t like that at the beginning, particularly due to my English—the learning curve was steep. Anyway, I have discussed and interacted with my students about all these issues I want to talk about today, so this is purely based on my first- and second-hand experiences. I don’t think this will be the best guide you can find on the Internet, but if you’re in a situation similar to my students’ or mine, I think it could help you a lot. Indeed, my students admit that they have improved their presentation quality greatly by using the skills I am going to share today.

I don’t think what I write today will apply to all academic disciplines, but I believe (hope) that this will be fairly relevant to CS/EE conferences.

TLDR

Reduce the amount of English text.
Reduce the number of math equations.
Engage with the audience.
- Don’t read from the script.
- Look at the audience, not the screens or scripts.
- Don’t memorize the script, either.
Practice, practice, and practice.

Motivation: Why Does It Matter?

You go to academic conferences to learn new research outcomes and/or to present your work. Depending on the area, this could be the best part of your research project’s lifespan (e.g., in computer science, where conference papers are as comprehensive as a journal paper). Hence, I hope you enjoy every moment of it.

But let’s think from the audience’s perspective for a while. Their conference experience depends a lot on the quality of the presentations. So, presenters are sort of responsible for the quality of the conference as well. If it were a music concert, the presenters would correspond to the musicians! Then, what kind of presentation is bad? In my case, I am most bothered when I don’t understand the presentation. To be fair to the presenters, it could be just me who is not up-to-date with the new research trend and not smart enough to understand an easy concept, while everyone else in the room does. However, it’s also true that some presentations are just not organized enough for an average person in the domain area to understand. As for writing papers, you could have heard of this rule of thumb: “the paper must be readable by junior graduate students in the same field.” The same principle applies here: the presentation must be introductory enough for the junior graduate students in your field.

So, why is making others understand your work essential to the presenters? If more people understand the work, they can spread the word faster. For example, the good old page rank algorithm behind Google’s search results is based on statistics of how many hyperlinks are referring to the page to show up in the first place. Likewise, if you give a nice presentation that many people can understand, they will bring the understanding back to where they are from and share it with their colleagues. Many companies and university research labs ask the conference participants to share what they saw with those who weren’t able to come to the conference. No one can effectively advertise the work that they cannot understand.

As a result, if your work gains more attention, you will be exposed to potential employers better. Your paper will be cited more, which will help you in the long run. You get to know more people as they will remember you better.

The reason I’d like to emphasize this “make-people-understand” aspect first is that it allows you to consider what kind of presentation you want to give, serving as a guiding principle.

Problem 1: Too Much Text

Putting text in the slides is easy, as you might already have some text to copy from, e.g., the paper you are presenting. But, text is harmful if it’s too much. Here are a few reasons.

A lot of text on the screen forces people to read it instead of listening to what you say. Basically, you are losing your audience to your own slides.
Typically, they are given too short time to to read and understand the text on screen, which is too much information to digest in time.
And you lose the opportunity to show more important things, e.g., audio or video demo, that you can never show effectively on your PDF version of the paper.
If what you “say” is similar to the displayed text, what’s the point of the presentation? You can just stop talking and let people read the text on the slide. The whole point of the presentation is to make people understand your work better. If your slide deck consists of excerpts from your paper, the presentation is no better than having them read the paper.

My suggestion: so, when can we use text?

I think using keywords or very short sentences is fine. Some accompanying infographics help as well.
If you have to use sentences, be creative and shorten them as much as possible. That way, people can read it at a glance. Note that the speed of reading English sentences for people using English as a second language (ESL) can vary significantly. Depending on the area, ESL people could be a big majority of the conference audience. For them, you want to reduce sentences anyway. For example,
- “A lot of text on the screen forces people to read it instead of listening to what you say. Basically, you are losing your audience to your own slides.”
  ==> “Too much text is a distraction. Let them listen to you instead.”
- “The whole point of the presentation is to make people understand your work better. If your slide deck consists of excerpts from your paper, the presentation is no better than having them read the paper.”
  ==> “Copying and pasting from your paper is redundant, thus pointless.”

Here are some examples. Which one looks better, assuming the audience is reading these slides while the presenter is talking simultaneously?

Now that I have complained enough about the too-much-text issue, I feel bad for typing too much text for this blog posting… But it must be fine because a blog post is supposed to contain some text, so readers are more forgiving (hopefully).

Another exception is my slides for class: I deliberately use more text for those who want to review the lecture using the slides. But, conferences are a little different because basically nobody reviews your slides afterwards.

Problem 2: Too Much Math

I have mixed feelings about math. I have been educated to be good at math since I can remember, and I agree that math equations are the best way to share complex concepts clearly—it’s like a universally used language among scientists and engineers. For example, I consider good math equations the backbone of the research paper, while English sentences flesh out to elaborate on them. However, when it comes to using math equations on the slides, we better be careful for the following reasons:

Some math notations don’t make sense until they are properly defined. There are some universally working notations, e.g., $f(x)$ , while confusing definitions also exist, e.g., calligraphic capitalized letters for high-order tensors $\mathcal{R}$ , which can also mean a set of numbers. You might try to follow the convention you think your field widely adopts, but there is always a chance of losing your audience. More importantly, you don’t have time to define all those notations in the middle of your 15-minute talk (or even shorter spotlight talks).
Even if the equation consists of clearly defined notations, it takes more time and effort for the audience to decipher it than reading text, listening to your explanation, or understanding from visual and aural examples. If you truly want to make people understand your work, you want to use the most accessible method to explain it, rather than testing people’s ability to understand a mathematical concept instantly. Remember, they only have 15 minutes (or less) and are new to your work.
A more in-depth mathematical explanation can sometimes help you: it convinces a few people who are very familiar with the subject. That being said, you might lose your chance to reach out to other smart folks who are from slightly different sub-areas, e.g., a hiring manager of a CV team who can use your expertise in audio processing for a new multimodal project, a search committee member who is looking for a candidate in your subject area who’s not an expert in that particular area, etc. They are also intelligent experts in their own areas, but they just don’t have enough context or background knowledge in your specific area, hence being lost in your talk.
Similarly to my argument on the too-much-text, it might be a better use of your talk time if you can showcase other things that you couldn’t include in your paper PDF or poster, where video and audio examples are not allowed (unfortunately). As for math, people will follow up later on to check on the details when they have time and at their convenience.

My suggestion: so, when can we use math and how?

I suggest that the presenters put some effort into simplifying their math in the presentation version. There might be some subscripts and superscripts that decorate the symbol, which are impossible to understand without the context. You can remove them while keeping the core information.
It’s always good to replace the process defined by math with a figure and diagram.

For example, the following equation $\mathcal{L}_{\text{emb}} = – \sum_{i,j \sim \mathbb{S}^{(k)}, \ \forall k} \log \sigma (\mathbf{z}_i^\top \mathbf{z}_j) – \sum_{i \sim \mathbb{S}^{(k)},\ j \sim \mathbb{S}^{(k’)},\ k \neq k’} \log \left( 1 – \sigma (\mathbf{z}_i^\top \mathbf{z}_j) \right)$ means that there are two loss terms in the loss function: one that penalizes dissimilarity between two embeddings $\mathbf{z}_i$ and $\mathbf{z}_j$ if they are from the same subset $\mathbb{S}^{(k)}$ and the other one that penalizes a similar pair that are from different subsets $k$ and $k’$. And $\mathbf{z}_i$ and $\mathbf{z}_j$ are results of feeding the input samples $\mathbf{x}_i$ and $\mathbf{x}_j$ to a function $f(\mathbf{x})$. Sorry for the jargon if you are not familiar with the concept. All these math definitions can be presented better with a visual process as follows.

Since it’s showing the process with visual examples, and some help from animation effects (which should be synced with what you say), people get it better than just dumping math equations. In this case, I omitted the set notations and their indices, and instead chose to use English explanations.

Problem 3: Not Engaging with the Audience

Visual communication is a big part of verbal communication. Depending on how you use it, your presentation can make people focus more easily. However, unless well-prepared, it’s very easy for the presenter to look at the screen rather than making eye contact with the audience. Suppose you are taking a class in school, and the instructor only writes something on the board, talking to the board, while showing their back to the class, never looking at the students. Can you stand this situation? Then, you shouldn’t do that to the audience of your talk, either. Here are common reasons why that happens.

The presenter is unnecessarily anxious about the presentation for various reasons. What if I make grammatical mistakes? What if my pronunciation is too bad for people to understand? What if I can’t keep the time? What if I forget important things that I have to say?
Some people choose to prepare for a script ahead of time and read it at the podium. It’s indeed a safer way, because most of the issues mentioned earlier could be resolved. But it comes at a BIG cost.
- Reading written text is different from natural conversations, as the speech characteristics are very different: usually, reading from a script by a nervous presenter sounds monotonous, robotic, and flat. Yes, the presenter can safely “read” all the things that are meant to be said, but actually, this is a very difficult type of English intonation for one to understand due to the difference from natural ones.
- Written sentences tend to be longer and more complex than colloquial ones, making them more difficult for people to understand when spoken instead of written.
- People typically practice a lot less when they plan to read the script. Instead, they just try to come up with a more correct script, which they will “read.” It makes the presentation look unprepared, and the aforementioned intonation issues worsen.
- Since you have to read the script on your screen, you have no chance to make eye contact with the audience, who are already lost due to your boring presentation.
- There are paralinguistic information you could carry by giving a normal talk, which doesn’t exist if you read from the script.
As an alternative, if you plan to memorize the entire script instead of reading it, I admire your efforts, but it may not be as effective as an optimal presentation. If you rely too much on your memory, you can forget a few lines and freeze in front of everyone. Often, it doesn’t sound natural either. I tried to do it before, but I realized it was unrealistic, especially for an hour-long job talk.

My suggestion: so, what’s the best way?

I know it sounds scary if you don’t have a script to read, while you are an ESL person without enough presentation experience. So it might sound counterintuitive to you not to use the script. But, it’s really like learning how to bike: if you keep relying on the training wheels, you will never learn how to bike. So, it’s time to take off the training wheels: your script!
Instead, you practice multiple times. Here are some tips.
- Imagine you are talking to your classmate, or a labmate, who you are close to. They might have a friendly personality, so you are at least not scared of them. You don’t have to have them in front of you, but you can just imagine that they are your audience. One person is enough.
- Explain the slides to that person in plain language. You are not doing a conference presentation, but you are just explaining your paper to your graduate-student friend orally, using your slides.
- The only difference here is that you need to measure the time. Measure how much time you spend on each slide.
- Repeat this over and over again until you can deliver the entire presentation within the given amount of time (e.g., 15 minutes).
In the beginning, you might be spending, say, 50 minutes. Don’t be disappointed. You might have mumbled a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and tried to fix them by rephrasing what you said, etc. Due to the lack of practice, your pace might not have been fast enough. Try to do it again.
If you repeat it multiple times, you will see that your sentences become more efficient, you are making fewer mistakes, and you can talk a lot faster. If it still takes too much time, it might be time to reduce sentences or even cut out some slides. But again, the whole point is that by repeating the mock-up presentation multiple times, you get better and better.
When I was new to this process, it took 10-20 practice routines to finish. I usually did it on my way to the conference, in the airplain and airport. These days, if it’s a very important talk, I still practice multiple times, but usually five times are okay. You may think it’s a lot of repetition, but the actual amount of time you spend for this might be about the same as coming up with a nice script. More importantly, in this way, you can give a very natural and engaging talk!

Other Common Mistakes

Orphan content on the slide: Whatever is shown on the slide needs to be there with a reason. If you have a big diagram, a photo image, or even a paragraph that you never mention or use in the oral part of your presentation, they are left there with no reason. People are distracted by that content, expecting you to talk about it, while you never mention it. Everything on the slides should be there with a reason. Not sure what to do with a figure on your slide? Delete!
Laser pointer misuse: If you can sit in front of your laptop, hitting the space bar to move on to the next slide, or moving your mouse pointer to indicate the area people have to watch, you are lucky. Even if you can do that, you will need to spend a lot of time interacting with the laptop, not the audience. In this case, a laser pointer is a pretty nice option, because you can turn the pages and point at the screen seamlessly. However, there are common mistakes in using a laser pointer. For example, if the laser pointer dances on the screen, that can be very distracting. So try to keep its movement steady. Always check its battery so it’s visible from the back of the room (e.g., a laser pointer on an LED screen is not visible). I personally like to use a fancy remote that recognizes its movement in the air and turns it into the pointer movement. It’s a very nice option, but the presenter needs to get used to it beforehand.
Too much or too little animation: I do use animation effects, especially to show bullet points or other objects on the same slide one by one. That way, people can pay more attention to the specific part of the slide rather than being distracted by a busy slide full of information all at once. Also, that way, I don’t have to turn my body to the screen to laser-point to the part that I’m emphasizing: more eye contact! Meanwhile, unless you are very careful about your animation sequence and its organization, too much animation effect can be a distraction, too. In addition, if you just want to show something at a specific time using animations, instead of using an ostentatious one, choose something simple, e.g., the “appear” effect in PowerPoint or Keynote. Since animations are a double-edged sword, I’d recommend that we use them sparingly.
Too much decoration: I like pretty slides. When somebody asked me whether I’m hiring a slideshow designer, I was very flattered. That being said, I also admit that I’m just an ordinary computer scientist with no particular training in art. Hence, I prefer to rely on a well-organized template, and then focus on the content instead of decoration. Sometimes, it’s pleasing to see beautiful slideshows at technical conferences, but other times, I’ve also found that too many decorations on the slides can be a big distraction. Since we are neither selling a product nor showcasing our artistic talent at a technical conference, I think it’s safer to rely on a clean and easy-to-read template. If you are not sure, it’s a good idea to use your department, university, or employer’s official templates, as they are often made carefully by experts.
Time management: When I see a presenter who speaks too slowly, I feel nervous, especially if the work appears to be of high quality. Nobody gives us an infinite amount of time for our talk. The audience’s attention doesn’t last for too long either. So, we have to do our best to deliver all the good things about our work within the short amount of time given to us. If you speak too slowly, you might have given up essential parts of your work, such as a comparison to the seminal work, an interesting ablation study, or an audiovisual demo that can engage the audience better. So, practice your speech as much as possible to improve the pace of your speech. If you are a fast-talker, the same story goes on. More practice can help organize your thoughts and muscles around your mouth, making the talk more engaging at the same speed.
Choice of the software: There is no gold standard here. Some people prefer Google Slides over others due to their convenience, while others are loyal to Keynote or Beamer. No matter what your choice is, it’s always a good idea to keep in mind that you might need to give the talk in a new computing environment. It could fail to show a very particular font you used; Your Keynote presentation doesn’t work on Windows machines; No Internet connection to your Google Slides, etc. Try to prepare a backup solution for these issues, e.g., by using commonly available fonts while sacrificing your aesthetic standards, downloading a local copy from the cloud services, etc. I use PowerPoint + LaTeXiT on my Mac because of their flexibility and convenience.
Remote or recorded presentations: It’s not too different if it’s a remote presentation. It’s true that eye contact is not possible… but for example, “reading from the script” is certainly noticeable and more detrimental due to the lack of eye contact.

Some Good Examples

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when conferences were virtual, I had numerous opportunities to improve the recorded versions of my students’ oral presentations. It must have been painful for them to practice too much, but the results were great. Here are a few nice ones I would like to share. Please note that they might not be perfect, as they performed it live rather than reading or memorizing the script, but that’s why they sound very natural and more engaging. In addition, I deliberately chose international students’ presentations to motivate readers who are ESL speakers.