How to give a good conference talk

How to give a great research talk: https://simon.peytonjones.org/great-research-talk/

• Your presentation is not a summary of your entire paper
  • You should present the most interesting findings/learnings from your work
  • Consider your presentation an advert for your full paper (“Here’s what we found. If you would like to know more details, you can find them in the paper.”)
• Always tell a story:
  • What was the problem?
  • What did I/we do?
  • What do we know now?
• Have your challenge/problem statement as early as possible
  • You already know about the relevance of your research, but your audience may not
  • Until you have convinced your audience of the relevance of what you are presenting, you will have a hard time capturing their attention
• Manage your audience’s expectations
  • Make sure that your listeners know:
    • Why am I here?
    • What will I learn today?
• You are the protagonist, your slides are the backdrop
  • Use your slides to demonstrate, illustrate, and emphasize
  • There is no need to fill your slides with text that is identical to your speech
  • If your slides distract from what you say, they do the opposite of what they are supposed to do
  • Less is more
• Nervous? So are we, even after hundreds of presentations, believe it or not. You can’t make it magically go away, but you can learn to manage it.
• Come prepared
  • Be there early for the technical check
  • Bring a backup copy of your slides on a pen drive
  • Expect technical difficulties
    • If you have a video, have a backup plan in case it won’t play or has no sound
    • Expect to have less time for your presentation in case you struggle with the presenter or monitor settings, experience microphone issues, etc.
    • Expect your slide animations not to work – make sure you can convey what you need to on a completely static presentation if needed
  • You don’t want these things to happen, but knowing you have a plan B will do wonders for your stress levels if they do.
• Do not practice a full speech sentence-by-sentence (aka, do not read or recite an LLM-generated script)
  • Think of what content you want to convey to your audience, not the exact wording
  • Each slide should be a number of bullet points in your head, containing the things you want to convey. As soon as you are through with all points, you are done and can proceed to the next. The exact wording is ultimately irrelevant.
  • The more rigidly you prepare your presentation, the more likely it is for you to lose the thread in the middle
    • It is a lot easier to remember the conclusion you want to arrive at than it is to remember an exact sequence of words
  • When you rehearse your speech, focus on the timing first and foremost
    • Make sure you manage to say everything you want to tell the audience within the allotted time. That is the most important part, the rest is secondary.
• Don’t worry about the Q&A session
  • A Q&A-session is not an interrogation. It is an opportunity for the audience to gain additional info on a topic that had to be compressed into the presentation time slot.
  • No matter how junior or senior you may be, when you are the presenter, you are the teacher and the audience are your students who are there because they want to learn from you.
  • An audience that asks questions is an engaged audience, which means you did a great job.
  • The audience asks because they want to know more about what you did. This is a positive, even if the questions may not always be easy to answer.
  • But what if you are unable to answer a question?
    • “That is a very good question that I will need to think about for a bit. I’m afraid I cannot answer it right now but we can discuss it afterwards if you’d like.”