Giving Talks
Some principles about how to give talks.
Heilmeier Catechism
- 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.