How to give a good research talk

Reading : "How to give a good research talk," Jones et. al.

For a person who gives a 30-60 minutes talk, there are several suggestions to follow.

First, prepare appropriate content according to background knowledge of the audience. Omit unnecessary contents and remain the things that can convince the listeners of the primary topic. It may be more persuasive with precisely motivating examples. Second, use an overhead projector is effective. Put what is about to be explained on the slides, which not only saves the visual bandwidth but also gives the audience emphasis. Prepare the slides just one day before the talk may help us have fresh materials in our minds. Third, overcome nerves, show clear slides, and do not overrun. Try deep breathing or exercise may be effective to reduce nerves. Do not reveal a slide line by line or block people’s view. It is limited for a person to follow in a constant period of time, so take whether the listeners get the point into consideration before jump to the next section. Moreover, it is quite helpful to reorient the audience with a slide for each part.

In my opinion, prepare slides by typesetting with computer rather than writing by hand also has advantages for me. It saves time and does nice if someone is familiar with some software, such as Powerpoint. Besides, rehearsal several times before giving a talk is really helpful in my experience.

How to Read a Paper

Reading : "How to Read a Paper," Keshav, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 2007

This writer shares an efficient method to read a paper. Because researchers may spent a lot of hours reading papers and it is terrible if wasting much effort in the process, he introduces the three-pass approach.

First of all, skim through the target paper quickly. Read only titles, abstract, introduction, and conclusion to get the main idea and contribution of that paper. After that, it is enough for us to decide whether we need to read further. Second, get the key points from figures, diagrams, and other illustrations. Graphs usually help us to know the thrust more clearly and show the results of the paper. After grasp more contents, it is time to skip the paper if abstruse or useless; otherwise, enter the third pass. In the third pass, do a deep reading to fully understand a paper. Pay attention to details, such as proves, assumptions, and particular techniques. After this pass, it should be able for us to reconstruct the overall idea and give practical comments. Besides, the writer suggests doing a literature survey iteratively. That is, after reading a paper, we may select relative papers to study according to citations and references.

The writer follows the discipline for many years. He is able to adjusts the depth of paper evaluation depending on his needs and how much time he has, and the three-pass approach really helps him to read a paper efficiently.