Technical Presentations That Work

Presenters want their audiences to listen and take away the main message of the presentation. Furthermore, presenters want the talk to be so interesting that audience members will download related papers, buy a book or invite the presenter to speak in another venue. A good presentation delivers the important message, is somewhat entertaining (but entertainment is not a substitute for solid technical content) and leaves the audience wanting more. Therefore good technical speaking skills are important for your career.

Fact: It is not too strong a statement to say that good presentation skills will open up a wide range of career opportunities (whether you take them or not is your choice). You will probably appreciate these opportunities when you have been doing the same job for five years and want to try something new.

Resources:

Here is a few resource for developing a good presentation:

• How to Give a Talk and Top Ten Ways to Lose an Audience by Tammy Kolda, Sandia National Laboratories.
• Deliver a Presentation Like Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo.
• How to Give a Really Lousy Technical Presentation by Joseph G. Haworth, Jr. and David J. Reardon.
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within by Edward R. Tufte.
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Slides Are Not All Evil by Jean-Luc Doumont.
• Giving an Academic Talk by Jonathan Shewchuk.

One of my talk:

Emerging Programming and Machine Models: Opportunities for Numerical Algorithms R&D by Michael A. Heroux //Link is die
Given at 2011 IMA Workshop on HPC for Emerging Architectures

Exercises: Prepare and give a 5-minute technical presentation on a topic of your choice.

1. Pick a technical area (other than your semester project topic) that you know well and in which have recently made some progress in understanding.
   Examples: Strategies for playing your favorite computer game; how to debug a Java program; how to develop a software product.
2. Develop a 3 to 7 slide presentation on the topic.
3. Deliver the presentation during class twice:
   1. First as a “dry run”.
   2. Second as a polished presentation.