Guidelines for Student Presenters

Twelfth Annual AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium

Information for Student Presenters

Oral Presentations

You will have 25 minutes to present your talk, followed by 20 minutes of discussion led by your assigned mentor. With 25 minutes, you'll probably want to aim for 13-17 slides, perhaps with "backup" slides prepared to answer anticipated questions.

Tip: Really, really avoid having too many slides. It is easy to try to cram too much info into your talk and then not be able to present any of it well.

Important: Presenting to the DC requires striking a balance between being accessible to a diverse audience (you're presenting to people from all areas of AI, not just your specialized field) and providing enough substantive detail to show what your personal contributions are (or will be). In that sense, it is akin to an academic job talk, which must appeal to everyone in a department yet also impress the few people who are experts in your own field. However, it is not supposed to be a presentation of final, polished work (as you might present to a conference or at a job talk). The goal is to get good feedback on the parts you're currently refining, where suggestions from the audience will be most helpful.

Tip: Don't confused polished presentation with polished work. It is important that your presentation be polished and professional. However, you are expected to be presenting work that is only partially completed. If you only show us polished, completed work, we will have nothing to give you feedback on!

This isn't easy, but with some careful thought you should be able to prepare a presentation that is accessible, thought-provoking, and leads to the kind of feedback and suggestions you'll find most useful for your final Ph.D. work. One of the advantages of the DC is exactly that: you'll get feedback from people who aren't intimately familiar with your subfield and can therefore help you make your contributions more understandable, and more significant, to the larger AI community.

Here is one recommendation for organizing your slides so as to meet these goals, with suggestions for how much time to devote to each:

An Introduction to the problem you're addressing (1-2 slides). Keep in mind that you will be addressing a very diverse audience. Limit your use of jargon, or carefully explain what the terms mean.
Your Research Objectives and (planned) Contributions in terms of solving the problem (1-2 slides).
Main content: A detailed discussion of what you've done (and are currently working on) to solve the problem you identified. This is where you provide the technical details of your work and your contributions. You should spend more time on your present and future work than your past work, again because that's where you'll be most able to use the feedback you get. Include a slide on Related Work. (6-10 slides)
Summarize this content with your Progress to Date (1 slide) and your Plan for Completion: (what remains to be done) (1 slide)
Wrap up with a restatement of your planned Contributions (1 slide).
Conclude with your Biggest Remaining Concerns or Open Questions (1 slide) This slide can help spark/guide the ensuing discussion. It shouldn't be your to-do list of items to accomplish before finishing, but instead the list of items you most would like to have feedback on or suggestions about. This is your opportunity to really get the most you can out of the Doctoral Consortium. Think about:
- What are your biggest open questions at this point in your research?
- What questions do you hope the panel will answer?

Tip: Practice, practice, practice! The best way to seem smooth and professional and to get timing right is to practice. Preferably, a few times by yourself and then a few times with an audience of peers who can give you useful critical feedback.

Tip: Know what to cut. If you do find yourself running short of time during your presentation, don't simply rush through the rest of your slides. You will prevent people from understanding any of the rest of your material. Instead, have planned ahead of time what material you can safely skip. Be graceful and say something like, "I would like to tell you about X, but I think I'll have to skip it in the interest of time."

REMEMBER The ultimate goal is not to show us a lot of text, data, and equations. The goal is to convey ideas. An enormous amount of information with no understanding is useless!

Other tips:

Spend most of the time on your (anticipated) research contributions, not on discussing the domain or related work. Motivation is important, as is a demonstration that you are familiar with (and possibly building on) related work, but neither of these should be the main part of your talk.
You should acknowledge your advisor and any other collaborators, but make it clear what your personal contribution is. Don't say "we" during your presentation, as a general rule. This is about your dissertation work.
Clearly differentiate previous work that you're building on (or contrasting with) from your work. A good way to do this is to start with a (brief) related work section, explicitly labeled, and then move to a Contributions section, also explicitly labeled.
Describe how you will evaluate your work.
Running examples are great for illustrating your ideas. Make it clear that this is just a simple example, and you plan to apply your work to more complex problems; characterize those problems as precisely as possible.
Number your slides, preferably with the notation "< k > of < N >," so that the audience can refer to them later by number.

As a reminder, each oral presenter should also prepare a poster, according to the guidelines below.

Poster Presentations

The AAAI-07 poster session will be held during a conference-wide event, including the technical posters, the student abstract posters, the intelligent systems demonstrations, and a light dinner reception on Wednesday, July 25, from 6:30 - 10:00 p.m. A specific area for Doctoral Consortium posters will be labeled in the poster session area to let you know where to place your poster. Below are the guidelines for the session:

You should make an effort to remain by the poster board during the entire session to answer questions and clarify statements. If you find that interest begins to wane after 8:30 p.m., please feel free to move about the session, checking back regularly to be sure than no one has questions about your poster. The session should be used as an opportunity to probe deeper into the abstract, and give attendees an opportunity to ask questions, so your presence is essential. If you would like to keep your poster, please be sure to retrieve it promptly at 10:00 p.m. on Wednesday night. Otherwise, it will be discarded.

AAAI will provide fabric-covered boards (4' x 8') and mounting supplies (push pins). The actual display area of the boards are 48"h x 96"w (4'x8') and they will be on stands horizontally/landscape. You are responsible for mounting your material on the board for presentation. This task should be completed NO LATER THAN 5:00 p.m. You may choose any board that is labeled for the DC presenters in the area.