Giving Talks

Some principles about how to give talks.

Heilmeier Catechism

Link

• What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
• How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
• What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
• Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
• What are the risks?
• How much will it cost?
• How long will it take?
• What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

Overview and Introduction of Papers

A list of things to look for when critically reading and discussing papers:

• Give intuition behind the method. What led up to this idea?
• Selling a paper vs. Giving an unbiased overview
  • Make sure to mention limitations and weaknesses
  • What parts of the problem can still be improved?
  • What problems are still unsolved by the technique?
• Quality vs. performance
  • If the paper only mentions one, it probably suffers in the other.
  • "A few milliseconds" How many? 5ms? 500ms?
  • "High-resolution" How high? 64x64? 8k?
  • Usually there is a trade-off between quality, performance, and robustness.

    Papers can improve on one, sometimes sacrificing another, but rarely all three.