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How To Read Write and Present

This document provides guidance on how to effectively read, write, and present academic papers. It recommends selectively reading relevant works, focusing papers on one or two clear ideas, and using visuals and a conversational tone to engage audiences when presenting. The goal is to concisely communicate essential information while maintaining readability and avoiding irritating readers with poor writing or presentation skills. Practice and balancing technical details are also emphasized.

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wosamy
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
87 views

How To Read Write and Present

This document provides guidance on how to effectively read, write, and present academic papers. It recommends selectively reading relevant works, focusing papers on one or two clear ideas, and using visuals and a conversational tone to engage audiences when presenting. The goal is to concisely communicate essential information while maintaining readability and avoiding irritating readers with poor writing or presentation skills. Practice and balancing technical details are also emphasized.

Uploaded by

wosamy
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Seminar Course CS 399

How to Read, Write, Present Papers

Anis Koubaa
Al-Imam Mohamed bin Saud University

Inverted and modified from Nitin H. Vaidya presentation


Outline

 Recommendations for Graduation Projects


 How to read papers?
 How to write papers?
 How to present papers?
Objective

 Learn best practices for efficient management of a


graduation project
 Learn professional skills in reading, writing and
presenting papers.
Recommendations for GP

 Feel motivated, be responsible


 Regular contact with your supervisor
 At least once per week
 Carefully read Graduation Project Policies
 http://www.aniskoubaa.net/ccis/cs399/GraduationProjectPolicies.pdf
 Make a plan for your work
 Gantt Chart
Reading a Paper

Getting sufficient background for your graduation project


Why to read papers?

 For Graduation Projects


 Getting a technical background
 Know about latest related works

 For advanced research


 Find interesting research topics
 Avoid re-inventing the wheel
 does happen commonly, too many wheels already
Why not to read papers

 Cannot read everything


 A lot of references:
 Should not read everything
 Selective reading
 Can suppress innovation
 Once you see solutions using a particular theme, often hard to
think differently
Read or not to read,that is the question

 Read, of course – but selective.


 Know what’s important.
 Know what can be ignored without significant loss of
information.
What to read?

 Basic references (ask your supervisor).


 Previous related graduation projects
 http://sites.google.com/site/ccisgraduationprojects
 Survey papers
 Related work papers
What to read?

 Major conferences – latest work


 Journals are a few years behind, but still can be useful
 Tech reports from active research groups
 need to know which groups to look up
 Survey / overview papers
 ACM Computing Surveys
 CACM, IEEE Computer, Spectrum
 more technical - IEEE Personal Communications, …
 newsletters - ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMOBILE, ...
What’s in a paper
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Motivation
 Problem description
 Solution
 ...
 Performance Analysis
 Conclusions
 Future Work
Paper Example
Paper Example
How to read a paper/report?

Set you objective why you want to read the paper/report

 To know what’s going on (e.g., scanning proceedings)


 title, authors, abstract

 Papers in your broad research area


 introduction, motivation, solution description, summary, conclusions
 sometimes reading more details useful, but not always

 Papers you may want to improve on


 read entire paper carefully
What to note

 Authors and research group


 Need to know where to look for a paper on particular topic

 Theme of the solution


 Should be able to go back to the paper if you need more info

 Approach to performance evaluation

 Note any shortcomings


How to Write
How to write a paper

 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.


How to write a paper

 Most papers are not that exceptional

 Good writing makes significant difference

 Better to say little clearly, than saying too much unclearly


Readability a must

 If the paper/report is not readable, author has not given


writing sufficient thought

 Two kinds of referees


 If I cannot understand the paper/report, it is the writer’s fault.
 If I cannot understand the paper/report, I cannot estimate the
paper as bad.

 Don’t take chances. Write the paper well.

 Badly written papers typically do not get read.


Do not irritate the reader

 Define notation before use


 Make a table before their use

 No one is impressed anymore by heavy math


 Make it simple to read

 If you use much notation, make it easy to find


 summarize most notation in one place
Do not irritate the reader

 Avoid Using Too Many Acronyms


 AUTMA ?!

 You may know the acronyms well. Do not assume that the
reader does (or cares to)

 Solution: make them in appendix


How to write a theory paper

 Unreadability is not the same as formalism

 Reader should be able to understand contributions without


reading all details

 If some proofs are not too important, relegate them to an


appendix.
How to write a theory paper
How to write a theory paper
How to write a systems paper

 Provide sufficient information to allow people to reproduce


your results
 people may want to reproduce exciting results
 do not assume this won’t happen to your paper
 besides, referees expect the information

 Do not provide wrong information

 Sometimes hard to provide all details in available space


 may be forced to omit some information
 judge what is most essential to the experiments
 cite a tech report for more information
How to write a systems paper
Discuss related work

 Explain how your work relates to state of the art

 Discuss relevant past work by other people too

 Remember, they may be reviewing your paper.


 Avoid: The scheme presented by Foulane performs terribly
 Prefer: The scheme by Foulane does not perform as well in
scenario X as it does in scenario Y

 Avoid offending people, unless you must


Tell them your shortcomings

 If your ideas do not work well in some interesting


scenarios, tell the reader
 People appreciate a balanced presentation
How to write weak results
 If results are not that great, come up with better ones

 Do not hide weak results behind bad writing


 Be sure to explain why results are weaker than you expected

 If you must publish: write well, but may have to go to second-


best conference
 Only a few conferences in any area are worth publishing in
 Too many papers in poor conferences bad for your reputation
 Just because a conference is “IEEE” or “ACM” or “International”
does not mean it is any good

 If results not good enough for a decent conference, rethink


your problem/solution
Miscellaneous

 Read some well-written papers


 award-winning papers from conferences

 Avoid long sentences

 If you have nothing to say, say nothing


 don’t feel obliged to fill up space with useless text
 if you must fill all available space, use more line spacing,
greater margins, bigger font, bigger figures, anything but
drivel
Technical reports

 Useful to get early feedback from other researchers

 Puts a timestamp on your work

 Can include more information / results than might fit in a


paper
Frequent Made Errors
Frequently Made Errors
 Bad English
 We do not ask for excellent writing skills, but at least avoid
silly errors
 Copy/Paste.
 Bad report structure
 Bad references
 Outdated
 All are web links
 Wrong reference formatting
 Bad formatting (even with LaTex).
How to Present
How to present a paper

 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you


How to present a paper
(at a conference)

Objectives, in decreasing order of importance

 Keep people awake and attentive


 everything has been tried: play fiddle, cartoons, jokes
 in most cases, extreme measures should not be needed
 humor can help

 Get the problem definition across


 people in audience may not be working on your problem
How to present a paper
(at a conference)

Objectives … in decreasing order of importance

 Explain your general approach


 most productive use of your time

 Dirty details
 most people in the audience probably do not care
 a typical conference includes 30+ paper presentations,
yours could be the N-th
Talk outline or not ?

 Useful when several ideas discussed in a single talk

 Short talks : Skip the outline

 Long talks : Include an outline

 Make the outline interesting


Text

You want people to (quickly) read your slides

 Use big enough font

 Do not put too much on one slide


 don’t want to keep them busy reading, instead of listening

 Use good color schemes


Not blue on yellow
Text

 Slide text need not be grammatically accurate

 Keep it short
 OK to omit some details
 fill them in when you present the paper

Practice makes perfect


versus
Practice can improve your presentations
PowerPoint, but not excessively

 Everybody has used PowerPoint

 No one is impressed by fancy backgrounds anymore

 Avoid using gratuitous animation

 Standard PowerPoint layouts can be useful


 decent font sizes and color schemes
Picture is worth 1000 words

 Use illustrations to explain complex algorithms

 Omit minor details, focus on the important

 They can read the paper to know the exact algorithm


Short talks

 May not have enough time to discuss all ideas clearly

 Focus talk on one or two ideas

 Summarize rest briefly

 Better to explain one idea well, than many ideas poorly


How to present a paper

 Avoid blocking the screen

 Point to the screen, rather than the slide on the projector


How many slides?

 Depends on personal style

 Rules of thumb
 1 slides for 1-2 minutes
 Know your pace

 I tend to make more slides than I might need, and skip the
not-so-important ones dynamically

 Anticipate technical questions, and prepare explanatory


slides
How to present a paper

 Practice makes perfect (or tolerable)

 May need several trials to fit your talk to available time


 particularly if you are not an experienced speaker
If English is your second language

 Accent may not be easy to understand

 Talk slowly

 Easier said than done


 I have a tough time slowing down myself
No substitute for experience

 Nothing like a terrible presentation to learn what not to do

 Try to learn from other people’s mistakes, instead of


waiting for your own
Summary

 Use common sense

 Learn from experience

 Enjoy!
 Papers can be fun
Useful references

 Speaker’s Guide, Ian Parberry

http://hercule.csci.unt.edu/ian/guides/guides.html

 The Best Method for Presentation of Research Results,


Veljko Milutinovic
http://www.computer.org/tab/tcca/NEWS/sept96/sept96.htm

 Many other guides on the web


Thanks !

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