Each student will present twice in the whole course. Both presentations will be on the topic of that day. Students can choose to present multiple papers – excluding the review paper, as everyone would have read it. Each presentation should be maximum 40 minutes long (25 mins presentation + 15 mins discussion and Q&A). Students should practice their talks in advance to make sure the timing is right.

The presentation should include a novel synthesis of the material – the idea is for you to teach that topic to the class. Slides and lecture notes are to be made available on the course website. The presentation of novel experiments exploring and reproducing the methods is encouraged but not strictly required.  Lectures should include the following:

• A cohesive overview of the topic by drawing observations from multiple papers.

• Discuss one/two papers in detail – not the review paper.

• A summary of the key ideas, motivations and insights of the work(s).

• A contextualization of the work(s) within the literature – especially the literature that, at the point of presentation, was previously reviewed in the course.

• Strengths & weaknesses of the work(s), and your own reflections (see the guidelines for paper reviews).

• Answering questions from your fellow students and instructor in class.

• Please keep in mind the following when preparing your talk:

  1. Since other students are likely not aware of the presented work(s), you need to slow-down and provide context for the class.

  2. Use lots of illustrations and other visual aids. In particular, don't limit yourself to the figures and illustrations that are found in the paper(s).

  3. Whenever possible, try to open up the lecture for discussions where other students can pitch in on an important point.

  4. Try to pause a couple of times in between the lecture to take questions / comments.