Final Project Presentation

Each project group will give a 45 minute presentation of their final project. You should prepare a 35 minute talk and assume that you will get 10 minutes of questions. Your presentation will be similar in style and organization to your paper presentation. A well organized talk will provide you with an excellent outline for your written report.

Obviously if you give your presentation on April 17th you may have some parts of your project that are not done. If this is the case, you should include a discussion of the unfinished parts of your project and what you need to do to complete them. Try to at least have some experimental results from the completed parts of your project that you can present in your talk.

Talk Organization

1. High level introduction
2. Details
3. Summary

1. Title & Outline slides (2 slides)
   be sure to include all group members names on the title slide.
   You should have an outline slide that gives that audience a road map of your talk.

2. Introduction and Motivation (4 slides)
   Start out with a big picture of your work: what, why, how.
   First motivate the problem you are solving (why is it interesting/important), then go through a high-level description of the problem you are solving, a high-level description of your solution, and a summary of the main results.

3. Details of Your Solution (6 slides)
   • Details of the problem you are solving
   • Details of your solution
   • Some details of your project's implementation
     You may not have enough time to describe in detail all of your implementation. Instead, give a high-level overview of the complete implementation, and then pick one or two parts to discuss in more detail.
   • Use at least one picture to explain your solution and/or implementation
   • Avoid using source code to describe parts of your implementation.
   
   If you have more details then can be discussed in 45 minutes, then present all parts of your project at a high-level and pick the one or two most interesting parts of your project to talk about in detail.

4. Experimental Results demonstrating/proving your solution (2-4 slides)
   • Explain the tests you performed (and why), and explain how you gathered the data
   • Present your key results
     Choose quality over quantity; the audience will not be impressed with all the test that you ran, instead s/he wants to be convinced that your results show something interesting and that your experiments validate your conclusions.
   • Discuss your results.
     Explain/interpret your results (possibly compare your results to related work). Explain why your results fit (or don't fit) what you expected. Do not just present data and leave it up to the audience to infer what the data show and why it is interesting.
     
     When presenting tables or graphs a good guideline is to first give a high-level description of what the graph shows (e.g. "this graph shows that algorithm A outperform algorithm B when the degree of parallelism is greater than 4"), then discuss the graph ("the X axis is... the Y axis is ..., the red curve is ..., the blue curve ..."), then summarize what the graph shows and why the results make sense ("thus you can see that as the A performs better than B as the number of nodes increase above 4. this result makes sense because B's time is dominated by communication costs when distributed over 4 or more nodes as is shown in the next graph...")

5. Conclusions & Future Directions for your work (2-3 slides)
   • Conclude with the main ideas and results of your work.
   • Discuss lessons learned and future directions for your work
     What lessons did you learn from your project? What was difficult? What do you wish you could have done (or done differently)? How could your project be extended...what's next? Are there any interesting problems or questions that resulted from your work?

6. Back-up Slides
   You may want to prepare a few back-up slides that describe parts of your project that you do not plan to talk about in your presentation or that contain additional experimental measures that you do not plan to discuss. These can be used to help you answer any questions that you may get about these parts of your project.