Presentation/discussion of a paper
The presentation should last 40 minutes, which includes significant discussion.
The presenter can split this time in 25minutes of talking + 10minutes of discussion+5 minutes of feedback. The disucssion will be interspersed with the talking.
Treat this like you are lecturing and focus on teaching your peers clearly and effectively, an important skill to have in research and in graduate school.
Clarity is very important in research, so it will be a main consideration when I grade your presentation. Also, the ability to distill what is important in a paper and what is not as important. A common mistake is presenting too many details of a paper. You do not need and you should not cover the whole paper assigned. Any one paper will have too much information. Identify the main points, and present only those. If you cover too much, you will likely lose your colleagues or they might not be able to remember the main points. I cannot emphasize more that LESS is better.
You should read and understand the paper very well to be able to explain it to your colleagues and to answer questions correctly. The other students are not
expected to have read the paper.
Students and I will ask questions.
I encourage you to also ask questions to your peers as well to make sure they grasped what you taught so far: focus on their learning and not on yourself.
Think of what your peers have been taught already and relate to their knowledge. If they need some background to understand a concept, give them that background. Stop and check that your peers are following. If they are not, go back and re-explain some parts.
Before your presentation, contact me so I give you some suggestions on what to cover and what not. Often, your presentation will come in the second half of the class after I lectured in the first half. In this situation, I can give you some suggestions on how to synchronize and compare to what I will be teaching that day.
You can use any presentation tools (e.g., slides, whiteboard).
Here are some suggestions for your presentation, but ultimately you decide what to include in it:
- The system setup and the threat model are often important to undestand a security work. You could draw a diagram to illustrate them. Also important are the security guarantees, but you do not need to go into formal definitions.
- Describe the protocol, scheme or system at a level clearly understandable in the given time. At the end of the day, all that your colleagues need to understand is the main insight, idea, approach, or technique of the paper.
- If I am lecturing in the first half, relate the paper you are presenting to the material I presented.
At the end of the presentation, the class and staff will give feedback on your presentation. Feedback is very important for learning better presentation skills and is a learning experience both for the presenter and for the students giving feedback or listening to the feedback of other students.
A helpful idea is that in many cases there are online talks from the authors of the work you are presenting and you can even ask them for the slides and adapt them for the class (but give them credit in this case on the title slide).
People who scribe during these lectures should also cover this student presentation.