assignments

A couple of weeks ago, I presented at the Algorithms Reading Group two papers that I had previously read for my honours work. The first week, I presented How Bad is Selfish Routing? (Roughgarden and Tardos), and that attempt was … let’s just say that there was (substantial) room for improvement in the presentation style. Several points to take away:

• Slides don’t really help in presenting a paper: the mode of delivery of a paper is necessarily different to that of a lecture. It’s much more dense, and the bite-sized chunks that slides give you don’t do justice to the material in the paper, and in fact, make it harder to follow. For example, definitions are great, but when taken off the page and onto several slides-worth of definitions, your eyes do glaze over.
• Sleep is useful: never present after getting very little sleep
• Know the details very well: you might think you know the paper well, but when presenting a paper, you need to know how each part can be obtained with precision. People will ask you things you’ve never thought about. It’s often stated that you only know something well when you can teach it. Corollary: practise presentations before giving them.

Overall, it was a good first attempt. I’m quite proud of the slides still, and they might be useful for someone starting out in this area: they can be downloaded here (handout). This was my first attempt at using the LaTeX Beamer class, and I must say that I’m now a convert. PowerPoint has its uses still, but definitely not for very technical talks.*

The second attempt was far better. This was presenting The Price of Routing Unsplittable Flow (Awerbuch, Azar and Epstein), and I did the entire thing with a whiteboard and a marker… and I rehearsed it with Tasos. I walked into it feeling more confident, and I felt that the audience walked out of it with a good understanding of the paper’s contents.

For another honours-related moral: Don’t edit your work after you’ve written it. Just hand it in. Bizarre? Well, it turned out that while editing the Research Approach document after discussing it with my supervisor, I accidentally deleted half of a sentence and didn’t realise it. The marker adjusted the mark accordingly. Fine, to be fair, it should be: Don’t edit your work when you’re half asleep. The mistake is now corrected.

Footnote:
* I recently got Mathematica 6, and there’s a new slide show view - so that might be a good way to go for those who don’t like typing LaTeX code. As an aside, I’m quite impressed with the new visualisation capabilities of Mathematica 6, and I’ll be sure to use it in my work.