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The thesis presentation was my first attempt at doing a Lessig Method presentation — I know it’s not entirely original, but I wanted to do something to make people wake up after half a dozen or so presentations. It wasn’t entirely smooth, but with practice, it should get better (I did it again at the SUITS AGM - slides later).
Tags: lessig method, poster, presentation
This semester, we’ve been taking a course called “Algorithmic Game Theory”, which is the broad area that my thesis topic belongs in. Although Tasos is the course coordinator, and lectured the first couple of lectures, the bulk of the “lecturing” has fallen to the students in the course.
Last week was my turn, and I did my talk on evolutionary game theory. I had been interested in that ever since I read Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, where he makes use of evolutionary game theory, albeit in a non-mathematical way, to explain his ideas for the evolution of genes. In a nutshell, evolutionary game theory allows you look at the evolution of strategies/genes/behaviours in a large population of organisms. For example, can a mutant gene overtake an incumbent gene? See the link before for more information, or read my lecture slides: evolutionary.pptx, evolutionary.pdf.
Now, onto the second half of the post’s title: why I’d hesitate to use PowerPoint again. I’ll begin with a clarification: why I’d hesitate to use PowerPoint again where I need to use equations at all. (If you’re an OpenOffice fan and you’re beginning to smirk, here’s something to wipe your smirk off: OpenOffice Impress fails to impress me even more dramatically. Sorry.)
I’ve been using LaTeX with Beamer for my presentations this year, and I’ve had a good experience with it so far. Why did I use PowerPoint? Mainly because I haven’t used PowerPoint 2007 for any real purpose so far, and secondly, because I saw that Word 2007 had a new flashy equation editor that’s kind of nice. It was a bit of a disappointment for me when I had finished writing all the slides with no maths to find that PowerPoint somehow failed to inherit this. Back to old Equation Editor. I hate it, so I took to doing the equations in Word and then copying them over as pictures. The main problem with all this is that, for a mathematical presentation, equations should not be treated as pictures. PowerPoint and OpenOffice both lack the ability to insert equations as inline text, and that frustrates me to no end. Another minor little gripe is that there’s no in-built way to have navigation bars like you do in Beamer.
The shocking thing is that most lecturers in academia, such as the School of IT, continue to use PowerPoint even though the set of tools it provides for technical presentations is minimal. (If you’re doing a sales pitch with pie charts and dot points, it’s fine.) Unfortunately, this just means there’s little incentive for Microsoft to go and improve the tools for this important market segment.
Tags: academia, algorithms, beamer, coursework, evolution, game theory, latex, powerpoint, presentation, richard dawkins
The SUITS seminar series aims to provide a casual lunchtime chat about interesting topics and cutting-edge research, and I had the privilege of taking the first one… and I took the chance to talk about Wikipedia, everyone’s favourite wiki. The audience is intended to be undergraduate level, but there weren’t any undergraduates there…
I gave a brief insider’s look at Wikipedia, showing off some of the administrator tools that ordinary users cannot see. I went over some of the parts of the website (community portals, the Signpost, policy pages, special pages) that are important tools for regular contributors, especially in keeping track of vandalism. I also mentioned the efforts under way to form the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Because if I talk for too long, people might die from boredom (!!) so I brought along some light entertainment. I played a bit of Eben Moglen’s lecture on GPLv3 - the part about the arithmetic shop. I was going to play video from Wikimania 2007, but the lazy buggers haven’t put up anything yet, so I had to be content with 2006 stuff - but it turned out to be a good choice. Lawrence Lessig is a fantastic speaker - he speaks with conviction and there’s no one who can match his slides. Finally, I played a bit of audio from the Wikipedia Weekly, broadcasting from Taiwan during the conference.
Some of the questions I hadn’t really prepared for - e.g. a question on patents. I should know more than what I managed to mumble out… and no, I still haven’t learnt that presenting without much sleep isn’t good.
Tags: administrators, gpl, lawrence lessig, presentation, suits, vandalism, wikimania, wikimedia foundation, wikipedia signpost
I can say with some confidence that that was probably the most stressful stuvac I had ever endured. A presentation, an assignment and then another assignment due the same day as the exam on the first Monday… I was surprised I did reasonably ok at the exam itself having only slept maybe 3 hours the night before? It would be nice if I could lay all the blame on the lecturers for putting everything together but I don’t think the fault is entirely theirs…
More bad things happening. Stuck without an umbrella in torrential rain. Laptop latch broken, requires screwdriver. Norton AntiVirus 2007 “upgrade” does funny things to computer, ditched in fury.*
I’m going back to bed. My next exam isn’t till next Tuesday.
Footnote: * I am never buying another Symantec product again.
Tags: antivirus, assignments, exams, laptop, presentation, symantec, weather
Yesterday, I did my honours research proposal presentation: the slides can be downloaded here. Despite the very mathsy topic that I have, I’ve managed to make it pretty much maths free (except for the last slide 
) and just about anyone should be able to make it through at the least the introduction - so take a look if you’re wondering just what on earth I’m doing.
In other news, some (obviously very bored) people have applied game theory to the problem of cohabiting males and females sharing a toilet: the cooperative and non-cooperative cases are analysed.
Tags: game theory, presentation, selfish routing, toilet
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:
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.
Tags: algorithms, assignments, beamer, latex, mathematica, mistakes, paper, powerpoint, presentation, selfish routing, sleep
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