Seminar on Distributed Data
CIS 700/1, Spring 2002

Advice on Presenting Papers

The most important (and obvious) point is that you need to understand and be able to explain every important point of the paper you are presenting, in depth. This will typically involve reading the paper more than once; it will often require referring to other papers.

Of course, deciding which points in a given paper are important enough to read and research deeply is a judgement call. Signing up to present a paper does not mean that you have to read the transitive closure of its references, back to the beginning of history. But it does mean that you must try pretty hard to understand (the key parts of) what it is saying, and this will typically involve some background research.

With some papers, even some of the main points may simply be too obscure or tricky to figure out in a reasonable amount of time. That's life. But full understanding is always the goal.
Preparing a good presentation takes serious effort. Allocate at least ten hours.
The golden rule of all good presentations is to think about your audience---who they are, where they are coming from, what they already know, what they can understand easily, what will take more effort, what questions they have, etc.

In a reading seminar like this one, presenters must face a somewhat special problem: everybody listening to the presentation will already have read the primary paper(s)! So there is no point in simply regurgitating its contents. Instead, you should aim to...
- Spend a few minutes summarizing its key points in your own words (i.e., bring out what you think is important).
- Briefly review its major parts, to give people an opportunity to ask questions or introduce their own points for discussion.
- If there are important bits (key definitions, algorithms, or examples) that were hard to understand or technically tricky, it may be worth reviewing these in detail.
- Introduce material from supplemental readings that the rest of the participants have not read.
- Highlight points that seem worth discussing (because they shed light on broader issues, suggest further work, etc., or because they seem dubious or involve hidden assumptions)

Want to read more advice on making good presentations? Try here.