Class Presentations

Instructions for Signing-Up:

The (view-only) schedule is available here. The instructor will provide information on Piazza about signing up.

If you drop the class and do not intend to present a paper that you are signed up for, please inform the instructor as soon as possible! 

• Ideally your presentations should be on different days (but this might not always be possible).

• If you are signed up for a presentation slot and then remove your name (or ask to be removed) within 48 hours of the presentation, you will get zero points for the presentation.

• If you need to remove your name from a presentation slot, please inform the instructor and other classmates so that we can find a replacement presenter ASAP.

The exact number of presentations you will give depends on the class enrollment. If it turns out that students need to give more presentations than originally expected, we will decrease the number of paper reviews as needed.

The Actual Presentation:

Each presentation will be given 25 minutes. Make sure to practice and time the presentation! (We will allow brief clarification questions during the talk which can be answered quickly, but we will ask to have longer and open-ended discussions after the presentation, to avoid interfering too much with the 25-minute time block.)

You are welcome to reuse figures or videos from the authors in their paper, presentations, blog posts, etc.

We encourage you to use Google Slides to make it easier to quickly share with others, and submit a link to it on Gradescope  by 2:00pm (of the presentation day, which starts at 5:00pm). You can submit a single PDF that links to the slides. We also ask for a private post to the instructor with a link to the slides. We will add links to the slides on the class schedule after the class. You are, of course, welcome to continue fine-tuning the presentation afterwards (we won't grade anything until after the presentation), but it helps the instructor significantly if the slides themselves can be accessed before that.

It should be structured as follows:

• Motivation of the task/problem.

  • Show some images or videos from the results section showing us what the paper is trying to get the robot to achieve.  Then explain the problem that this paper is trying to address and why it is important.

• Why do previous approaches not sufficiently solve the task? (Prior Work)

  • Do not just list a bunch of related papers and describe how each one works. Instead, group the related papers into 3-4 categories of approaches.  For each category, explain roughly how each category approaches the problem,  and describe the limitations of the general approach of each category.

• Background material.

  • Find the basic methods (RL / optimization / etc) that this paper builds on and give a brief explanation (ideally with a visualization) of how each of these methods work.  You can take the visualization from another paper or from a blog post that explains these background methods.  Do not just list the previous methods that this paper uses without an explanation.  This background material can either be presented before the method or it can be integrated into the methods section of the presentation.

• The method.

  • First give a brief outline of the different components of the method.  This can usually be done best by copying a systems or outline figure from the paper and pointing to the different parts.

  • Then go into detail on each part of the method and explain how it works. Show equations if needed, but also try to show visualizations to give an intuition of how the method works.

• The results.

  • Start by playing videos of the robot / simulation showing qualitatively what the proposed method can achieve.

  • Then show each of the result figures / tables (as many as time allows) and explain what this result demonstrates.  Make sure to point to the different parts of the figure / table that you want the reader to look at, since the reader will not have seen this figure / table before.

• Paper summary. 

  • Recap the main points of the method and summarize the main results.

• Discussion questions.

  • List 4 discussion questions that you would like to discuss in class. See next subsection "Discussion Questions" for more detail.

Discussion Questions:

The last slide of the presentation should be a list of 4 discussion questions. These questions will be used to spur discussion during class. Possible topics for these discussion questions include:

• Why does the paper use approach A instead of B?

  • Approach B might be a simpler approach to the same problem.

  • Approach B might be another approach presented on the same day or previously in class.

• What are the tradeoffs between approach A and approach B for tackling problem X?

  • (where B is a paper presented on the same day or presented previously in class, or you can describe B in your presentation).

• How would this method handle situation Y?

• How could we design a method to tackle a different situation Y? 

Questions that are less conducive to a productive discussion include:

• Clarification of technical details.

  • This is a good question to ask the instructor or the paper authors, but are not necessarily conducive to discussion.

• How does this paper differ from paper B (which was not previously presented in class or on the same day)?

• This is a good question to ask on Piazza, but not in class discussion, since it will exclude many students who have not read paper B.

Each single class presentation you give is graded as follows on a 10-point scale:

• [1 point] Presentation of motivation of the task/problem.

• [1 point] Presentation of: why do previous approaches not solve this task?

• [1 point] Presentation of background material needed to understand the paper.

• [2 points] Presentation of method.

• [2 points] Presentation of results.

• [1 point] Presentation of paper summary.

• [1 point] Discussion questions.

• [1 point] Presentation administration (e.g., is it timed correctly, are slides reasonably free of typos, did you provide a link to the instructors by 2:00pm, etc.).

Your overall "class presentation" grade for the course is computed as follows:

• Every student will be asked to give N presentations; the exact number depends on enrollment. Thus, getting full credit on all N presentations means getting Nx10 points.

• At the end of the course, we will add up the scores for your presentations. We may drop the lowest presentation grade from your score (depending on class enrollment and the number of presentations given).

• Since it is also likely that some students might have to give more presentations than others, students who give more than N presentations will have each extra presentation added as extra credit. Thus, doing one extra presentation means getting possibly 10 more points to add to the numerator for your grade (without affecting the "points possible").

• Class participation: if you are not presenting in class, we hope that you will still participate in the class by asking good questions and providing insights about the different papers. (Try to ask one question in each class if possible.) This is where the "class participation" grade comes in. We will compute a participation grade and then combine it with the above class presentation grade based on you "official" paper presentations, which will result in the overal "class presentation" grade.