Paper presentations

Slides are due by 11:59pm two days before each class.

Students will work together in pairs to present the papers in this course. Each class will have one pair of student presenters who will collectively cover both assigned papers for that class. Each student should sign up to present for one or two classes.

As a presenter, you should assume that your classmates have all read the assigned papers before class. Instead of going through the assigned papers from beginning to end, your role is to contextualize the assigned papers and situate them within the literature, as well as to do a deeper dive into the key ideas and contributions of the assigned papers. After preparing your presentation, you should not only be an expert about the assigned papers, but also knowledgeable about the broader area that those papers are in.

Concretely, your presentation should have two components:

  1. Context. Read a few papers that are prior and/or concurrent work, and a few papers that came later and build upon the ideas in this paper. Share any background information that you think will help your classmates better understand the assigned readings. Summarize the broader landscape (as described by these papers) and situate the assigned papers within these works. For example, your presentation might answer the following questions:
    • What problem is the assigned paper tackling? What is the motivation?
    • What was the state-of-the-art before this paper? What was the prevailing view about this problem?
    • What was the key contribution made by this paper? What was the insight that allowed them to make this contribution?
    • How did this paper change how people think about this problem? How has future work built on top of it? Has this paper made a difference yet (or not)? Why or why not?
  2. Deep dives. Pick one key aspect of each assigned paper that you’d be interested to discuss in depth. This could be an experiment, a proof, an argument, etc. Go over it in detail, for example:
    • What is the setting?
    • How did the authors approach the problem?
    • What are the results? Did they support the claim?
    • Which details in their experiment, assumptions, argument etc. mattered?
    • What did you find interesting about this?
    • What might the paper have done differently?

These questions are just examples; they might or might not be appropriate for your given assigned paper.

The deep dives should be done separately for each of the assigned papers. The context can be shared or not, depending on the papers; this is up to you. Within the pair of presenters, you may choose to allocate the sections however you wish, but each person should speak for approximately half the time. We encourage you to jointly discuss and create the presentation.

You should aim to find and read 5-10 related papers. You can use our suggested optional reading as a resource, but you don’t have to stick to it. Your papers may include literature surveys, technical reports, blog posts, etc. Of course, this takes time! You probably don’t need to understand every small detail of these other papers; read them to the level where you have an informed opinion about those papers and are comfortable discussing the main ideas in them.

Presenters are welcome to come by office hours the week before their presentation to discuss.

Deliverables

  • Prepare a 20-30 minute long presentation (combined, for both presenters and both assigned papers).
  • By 11:59pm two days before class, submit a PDF of your slides on Gradescope.
    • Only one presenter should submit. Indicate the names of both presenters on the slides.
    • Submit this as a PDF with one slide per page and with presenter notes. The notes don’t have to be a full script; they can be rough bullet points.
    • One slide should be a bibliography of the papers you read.
  • We might give you feedback on the presentation by the day before class. If we don’t have any requested changes, this is a good sign!
  • You may continue to edit the slides after submitting them. During class, present from your own laptop. (If this will be an issue, let the course staff know.)