mathematica

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.