How to present your (Systems) Research: Oral Presentations (Part 1)

It has been a long time since I wrote anything for my blog. I have a bunch of half written things, but let me see if I can actually write a complete post!  Well, not a complete post - how about the "first in a series" post?  I'm running a workshop this summer and it's more importanbt that I get little pieces of this out than I finish it all at once, so welcome to:

Part 1: Introduction and The Fairy Tale

It took me a long time as a professor to realize that I spent a great deal of my time working with students teaching them to communicate. Most of our students enter graduate school with excellent technical skills, and most have learned how to teach themselves additional technical skills. However, they have not necessarily been taught A) how to find a good research question worth pursuing or B) how to communicate what they have done effectively. Today's post is about the latter.

I've already written about writing (i.e., how to write a dissertation), so let's talk about how to present orally. There are two different dimensions that we can use to describe presentations: by type and by content. We'll do both. Let's start with the different types of presentation that largely differ in length, which leads to a corresponding difference in the level of detail that can be presented.

1. The Elevator Pitch: this is what you can tell someone in an elevator ride when they ask, "So, what are you working on?" It is also the 1-slide presentation you might give as part of an introduction. In Margo-speak, this is the fairy tale (an idea that will be familiar to anyone who has taken Harvard CS261 or UBC CPSC 508 or to anyone with whom I've written a paper); I'll get to that in just a bit.
2. The Status Update: This is typically presented to someone who knows what you are doing and your goal is to add to their understanding of the project by sharing not simply what you did recently, but what you've learned, how that has advanced the project, and how that leads to next steps. In other words, how did the things you've done in the current time period move the project forward, and what obstacles have you encountered.
3. The Work-In-Progress Talk (WIP): These are perhaps the most difficult. They are approximately 5-minute talks designed to summarize what you are working on now. Many conferences have explicit work-in-progress sessions. However, for years, the majority of NeurIPs presentations were 5-minute Spotlight talks, which were supposed to tell the whole story of a research project. For the most part, you best you can do here is convince someone to read your paper; it's difficult to relay too much technical content in five minutes when you first have to lay out the problem space.
4. The Conference Presentation: This is usually about a 20-minute talk (at least in my field). You get to describe the problem, present your solution, and demonstrate how well your solution works.
5. The Full Talk: This is typically a 45-60 minute talk (although even if you are told 60, I recommend 45 leaving plenty of time for questions). In many ways, this is the easiest talk to give, because you have the luxury of time, and you can tell the whole story.

Let's now disect a talk into its constituent elements (not all of which can be crammed into every talk).

1. The story: I will refer to this as the fairy tale, and I'll talk about that below.
2. An outline: Depending on the length of the talk, you often need to provide some structure, so the listener knows what's coming and how you are going to tell your story.
3. Motivation: What is the problem you are solving and why is it important? You might think it's important, but that doesn't mean your audience will care about it. Your job is to convince the audience that they really care. If you fail to convince them of that, it's going to be quite difficult to keep them engaged, even with the best work.
4. Your work: So, what exactly did you do?
5. The evaluation: How well did your solution work? Ideally you show both the strengths and weaknesses of your approach (although the latter is far too frequently swept under the rug)
6. Related work: How does your work fit into the landscape of existing work?
7. Conclusions: A good conclusion not only repeats what you've said already, but draws some larger takeaways and implications of your work.

If you have read my blog post on writing a dissertation, these parts should all appear familiar.

Now we can examine which elements go into which talks.

 

	Elevator Pitch	Status Update	WIP	Conference	Full Talk
Fairy Tale	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Outline	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Motivation	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Your Work	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
Evaluation	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Related Work	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Conclusions	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅

The astute reader will notice that the fairy tale appears in all talks, so let's start there. Humans love narratives. They like stories. They do not like being spoken at -- they want to be engaged and drawn into a compelling narrative. Therefore, if you want to truly engage your audience, you need to tell them a story. I claim that the fairy tale is the ultimate story and is particularly well matched to presenting research.

The Fairy Tale

A fairy tale follows a predictable pattern. It begins with, "Once upon a time." This is context setting. For research, what is the relevant state of the world (technology) from which your work begins? For example, "Computation is moving into the cloud," for work on cloud computing or data center operation. "Eighty-five percent of the world's population own cell phones," for work on mobility or phone apps. "DRAM accounts for 30% of the cost of most data centers today," for work on far memory. "Data centers alone account for 2% of all electricity consumption in the world, and this number is predicted to grow to 8% by 2030." for work on energy efficiency. Notice that this also serves as a teeny bit of motivation - it tells the listener both how to place your work in context but also why your work matters.  Contrast that opening with, "We present a better algorithm for doing X."

Soon after the context setting, a fairy tale introduces us to the villain to be vanquished. This corresponds to the problem we are trying to solve. Try to be precise -- poor performance is a weak villain; making people wait or wasting energy or using resources inefficiently so things are expensive are more compelling than, "We make something X% faster."

And for every good villain, we need a hero -- that's your solution!  How does your solution address the problem you just introduced?  In your initial fairy tale, you need not go into great detail here, just enough to give the listener a flavor of what you've done.

Finally, fairy tales end with a, "happily ever after." What good will come from your work? How does your work make the world better? How does it change that context in which your work took place? Why should the listener care about the work you've done.

So, the minimum story of your work is simply four sentences: the "once upon a time," the villain, the hero, and the "happily ever after."  It's really that simple -- you can write an abstract for pretty much any paper in 4-8 sentences if you can identify these four key points.  Try it!

For a well written paper, you can read the abstract and extract exactly these four elements. For a badly written paper, you will have to wade through at least the entire introduction (and maybe more) before you can extract these four ideas.

So, the key take away for this post is: master the elevator pitch by having a crisp, clear, and easy to understand statement of the four parts of the fairy tale.