Eleventh Annual AAAI/SIGART Doctoral
Consortium
Information for Student Presenters
Oral Presentations
You will have 25 minutes to present your talk, followed by 20 minutes
of discussion led by your assigned mentor. With 25 minutes, you'll
probably want to aim for 13-17 slides, perhaps with "backup" slides
prepared to answer anticipated questions.
Important:
Presenting to the DC requires striking a balance between being
accessible to a diverse audience (you're presenting to people from all
areas of AI, not just your specialized field) and providing enough
substantive detail to show what your personal contributions are (or
will be). In that sense, it is akin to an academic job talk, which
must appeal to everyone in a department yet also impress the few
people who are experts in your own field. However, it is not
supposed to be a presentation of final, polished work (as you might
present to a conference or at a job talk). The goal is to get good
feedback on the parts you're currently refining, where suggestions
from the audience will be most helpful.
This isn't easy, but with some careful thought you should be able to
prepare a presentation that is accessible, thought-provoking, and
leads to the kind of feedback and suggestions you'll find most useful
for your final Ph.D. work. One of the advantages of the DC is exactly
that: you'll get feedback from people who aren't intimately familiar
with your subfield and can therefore help you make your contributions
more understandable, and more significant, to the larger AI community.
Here is one recommendation for organizing your slides so as to meet these goals, with suggestions for how much time to devote to each:
- An Introduction to the problem you're addressing (1-2 slides). Keep in mind that you will be addressing a very diverse audience. Limit your use of jargon, or carefully explain what the terms mean.
- Your Research Objectives and (planned) Contributions in terms of solving the problem (1-2 slides).
- Main content: A detailed discussion of what you've done (and are currently working on) to solve the problem you identified. This is where you provide the technical details of your work and your contributions. You should spend more time on your present and future work than your past work, again because that's where you'll be most able to use the feedback you get. Include a slide on Related Work. (6-10 slides)
- Summarize this content with your Progress to Date (1 slide)
and your Plan for Completion: (what remains to be done) (1 slide)
- Wrap up with a restatement of your planned Contributions (1 slide).
- Conclude with your Biggest Remaining Concerns or Open
Questions (1 slide) This slide can help spark/guide the ensuing
discussion. It shouldn't be your to-do list of items to accomplish
before finishing, but instead the list of items you most would like to
have feedback on or suggestions about. This is your opportunity to
really get the most you can out of the Doctoral Consortium. Think about:
- What are your biggest open questions at this point in your research?
- What questions do you hope the panel will answer?
Other tips:
- Spend most of the time on your (anticipated) research
contributions, not on discussing the domain or related work.
Motivation is important, as is a demonstration that you are
familiar with (and possibly building on) related work, but neither
of these should be the main part of your talk.
- You should acknowledge your advisor and any other collaborators,
but make it clear what your personal contribution is. Don't say
"we" during your presentation, as a general rule. This is about
your dissertation work.
- Clearly differentiate previous work that you're building on (or
contrasting with) from your work. A good way to do this is to start
with a (brief) related work section, explicitly labeled, and then move
to a Contributions section, also explicitly labeled.
- Describe how you will evaluate your work.
- Running examples are great for illustrating your ideas. Make it
clear that this is just a simple example, and you plan to apply
your work to more complex problems; characterize those problems as
precisely as possible.
- Number your slides, preferably with the notation "< k > of < N >,"
so that the audience can refer to them later by number.
As a reminder, each oral presenter should also prepare a poster,
according to the guidelines below.
Poster Presentations
The AAAI-06 poster session will be held during a conference-wide
event, including the technical posters, the student abstract posters,
the intelligent systems demonstrations, and a light dinner reception
on Wednesday, July 19, from 5:30 - 9:30 p.m. A specific area for
Doctoral Consortium posters will be labeled in the poster session area
to let you know where to place your poster. Below are the guidelines
for the session:
- You should make an effort to remain by the poster board during
the entire session to answer questions and clarify statements. If you
find that interest begins to wane after 8:30 p.m., please feel free to
move about the session, checking back regularly to be sure than no one
has questions about your poster. The session should be used as an
opportunity to probe deeper into the abstract, and give attendees an
opportunity to ask questions, so your presence is essential. If you
would like to keep your poster, please be sure to retrieve it promptly
at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday night. Otherwise, it will be discarded.
- AAAI will provide fabric-covered boards (4' x 8') and mounting
supplies (push pins). The actual display area of the boards are 48"h x
96"w (4'x8') and they will be on stands horizontally/landscape. You
are responsible for mounting your material on the board for
presentation. This task should be completed NO LATER THAN 5:00 p.m. You
may choose any board that is labeled for the DC presenters in the
area.
- A good poster allows someone to grasp quickly what your research
is all about, and allows you to explain your ideas to them in more
detail in case they are interested. Some of the students who presented
posters a few years ago have made
their posters
available in case you would like to see some examples.
Kiri Wagstaff < Email : kiri.wagstaff@jpl.nasa.gov >
Last modified: Sun Jul 2 11:12:13 2006