How to give a good research talk
Simon Peyton Jones
Microsoft Research, Cambridge
1993 paper joint with
John Hughes (Chalmers),
John Launchbury (Oregon Graduate Institute)
Research is communication
The greatest ideas are worthless if you keep them to
yourself
Your papers and talks
Crystalise your ideas
Communicate them to others
Get feedback
Build relationships
(And garner research brownie points)
Do it! Do it! Do it!
Good papers and talks are a fundamental part of
research excellence
Invest time
Learn skills
Practice
Write a paper, and give a talk, about
any idea ,
no matter how weedy and insignificant it may seem
to you
Giving a good talk
This presentation is about how to give a good
research talk
What your talk is for
What to put in it (and what not to)
How to present it
What your talk is for
Your paper = The beef
Your talk = The beef
advertisment
Do not confuse the two
The purpose of your talk…
..is not:
To impress your audience with your brainpower
To tell them all you know about your topic
To present all the technical details
The purpose of your talk…
..but is:
To give your audience an intuitive feel for your idea
To make them foam at the mouth with eagerness to read
your paper
To engage, excite, provoke them
Your audience…
The audience you would like
Have read all your earlier papers
Thoroughly understand all the relevant theory of cartesian
closed endomorphic bifunctors
Are all agog to hear about the latest developments in your
work
Are fresh, alert, and ready for action
Your actual audience…
The audience you get
Have never heard of you
Have heard of bifunctors, but wish they hadn’t
Have just had lunch and are ready for a doze
Your mission is to
WAKE THEM UP
And make them glad they did
What to put in
What to put in
1. Motivation (20%)
2. Your key idea (80%)
3. There is no 3
Motivation
You have 2 minutes to engage your audience before they
start to doze
Why should I tune into this talk?
What is the problem?
Why is it an interesting problem?
Example: Java class files are large (brief figures), and get sent over
the network. Can we use language-aware compression to shrink
them?
Example: synchronisation errors in concurrent programs are a
nightmare to find. I’m going to show you a type system that finds
many such errors at compile time.
Your key idea
If the audience remembers only one thing from your talk,
what should it be?
You must identify a key idea. “What I did this
summer” is No Good.
Be specific. Don’t leave your audience to figure it out
for themselves.
Be absolutely specific. Say “If you remember nothing
else, remember this.”
Organise your talk around this specific goal.
Ruthlessly prune material that is irrelevant to this
goal.
Narrow, deep beats wide, shallow
No
Yes
Avoid shallow overviews at all costs
Cut to the chase: the technical “meat”
Your main weapon
Examples are your main
weapon
To motivate the work
To convey the basic intuition
To illustrate The Idea in action
To show extreme cases
To highlight shortcomings
When time is short, omit the general case,
not the example
Exceptions in Haskell?
Exceptions are to do with control flow
There is no control flow in a lazy functional program
Solution 1: use data values to carry exceptions
data Maybe a = Nothing
| Just a
lookup :: Name -> Dictionary -> Maybe Address
Often this is Just The Right Thing
[Spivey 1990, Wadler “list of successes”]
What to leave out
Outline of my talk
Background
The FLUGOL system
Shortcomings of FLUGOL
Overview of synthetic epimorphisms
π-reducible decidability of the pseudo-curried fragment
under the Snezkovwski invariant in FLUGOL
Benchmark results
Related work
Conclusions and further work
No outline!
“Outline of my talk”: conveys near zero information at the
start of your talk
But maybe put up an outline for orientation after
your motivation
…and signposts at pause points during the talk
Related work
[PMW83] The seminal paper
[SPZ88] First use of epimorphisms
[PN93] Application of epimorphisms to wibblification
[BXX98] Lacks full abstraction
[XXB99] Only runs on Sparc, no integration with GUI
Do not present related work
But
You absolutely must know the related work; respond
readily to questions
Acknowledge co-authors (title slide), and pre-cursors
(as you go along)
Do not disparage the opposition
X’s very interesting work does Y; I have extended it
to do Z
Technical detail
Omit technical details
Even though every line is drenched in your blood and
sweat, dense clouds of notation will send your audience
to sleep
Present specific aspects only;
refer to the paper for the
details
By all means have backup slides to use in response to
questions
Do not apologise
“I didn’t have time to prepare this talk properly”
“My computer broke down, so I don’t have the results I
expected”
“I don’t have time to tell you about this”
“I don’t feel qualified to address this audience”
Presenting your talk
Write your slides the night before
(…or at least, polish it then)
Your talk absolutely must be fresh in your mind
Ideas will occur to you during the conference, as you obsess
on your talk during other people’s presentations
Do not use typeset slides, unless you have a laptop too
Handwritten slides are fine
Use permanent ink
Get an eraser: toothpaste does not work
How to present your talk
By far the most important thing is to
be enthusiastic
Enthusiasm
If you do not seem excited by your idea, why should the
audience be?
It wakes ‘em up
Enthusiasm makes people dramatically more receptive
It gets you loosened up, breathing, moving around
The jelly effect
If you are anything like me, you will experience apparently-
severe pre-talk symptoms
Inability to breathe
Inability to stand up (legs give way)
Inability to operate brain
What to do about it
Deep breathing during previous talk
Script your first few sentences precisely
(=> no brain required)
Move around a lot, use large gestures, wave your arms, stand
on chairs
Go to the loo first
You are not a wimp. Everyone feels this way.
Being seen, being heard
Point at the screen, not at the overhead projector
Speak to someone at the back of the room, even if you have a
microphone on
Make eye contact; identify a nodder, and speak to him or her
(better still, more than one)
Watch audience for questions…
Questions
Questions are not a problem
Questions are a golden golden golden opportunity to
connect with your audience
Specifically encourage questions during your talk: pause briefly
now and then, ask for questions
Be prepared to truncate your talk if you run out of time.
Better to connect, and not to present all your material
Presenting your slides
A very annoying technique
is to reveal
your points
one
by one
by one, unless…
there is a punch line
Presenting your slides
Use animation effects
very very
very very
very very
very
sparingly
Finishing
Absolutely without fail,
finish on time
Audiences get restive and essentially stop listening when your
time is up. Continuing is very counter productive
Simply truncate and conclude
Do not say “would you like me to go on?” (it’s hard to say “no
thanks”)
There is hope
The general standard is so low
that you don’t have to be
outstanding to stand out
You will attend 50x as many talks as you give. Watch other
people’s talks intelligently, and pick up ideas for what to do and
what to avoid.
