ORALS
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Guidelines for ORAL PRESENTATIONS
Congratulations on having your paper’s selection for an ORAL presentation at CVPR 2009 in Miami, FL. As you well know, getting an ORAL presentation is a special privilege as you will be presenting to a room full of anywhere from 500-1000 people. It is essential that you take this presentation seriously and prepare your presentation to highlight the novel contribution of your research to the fullest. There are two primary aspects of this ORAL presentation. (1) Appropriate presentation materials to showcase your work and (2) Preparation, and appropriate (and repeated) practice of your presentation , to get you ready for a professional presentation of you research to a large crowd of your peers. Here we provide some guidelines to help you do both of these. Please pay attentions to these guidelines and recommendations.
1. Preparing Slides.
A key element of your CVPR 2009 presentation is your electronic slide preparation. The audience will base its evaluation of you and your subject matter partly on the appearance of your images. An attractive, legible, and organized presentation will reflect positively on the content, and therefore on you. Please review these basic guidelines to ensure that your CVPR 2009 presentation is the best it can possibly be:
A. Timing
Each ORAL presentation at CVPR is allocated 20 minutes. 15-16 minutes for the presentation and the rest for question / answers from the audience moderated by the session chair. Plan your talk and the number of slides to allow for a relaxed pace. A usual recommendation is of a slide per minute. If you have a lot more than that (say 30!), you will be rushing it for sure. Practice your talk before the conference. Time yourself. Think of what you would change if the presentation had to be shortened or lengthened. Force yourself to slow down a little. A rushed presentation will create more stress for you and won’t be compelling. Practice, practice, practice. You will notice that after a few practices you will be better paced and more comfortable with the presentation.
B. Legibility (Text/Fonts/Style)
The ORAL sessions rooms at CVPR 2009 are large and can accommodate up-to 900+ people in conference/classroom style seating. Your presentation must be legible from the back row, with decent lighting. If you can stand two meters away from your computer’s monitor and easily read your slides, your text is large enough. To achieve this, limit each slide to eight lines of text or less and limit each line of text to 30 characters or less. Use a bold typeface, no smaller than 28 points, with generous line spacing. Also, remember that slides with material (text/figures) all the way to the bottom of the slide are hard to read from the back rows. Leave the bottom inch of the slide content free.
Use key words, so that your slides will be quick and easy to read. You want the audience to hear your presentation, while the slides accentuate the points to remember. Use standard fonts. That way your presentation will be truly portable. Incorporate only the essential parts of a diagram and simplify whenever possible. While it is tempting to include detail for the sake of accuracy, too much will make the slide difficult to read and become a distraction. Break up complex diagrams into sections if you can, so that each section can be made larger and therefore more legible. If you use plots, make sure axis are marked and also legible.
C. Capitalization
Avoid the use of ALL CAPITAL letters. Words written in ALL CAPS are harder to read and take up more space on the screen. Use bold face and italics for emphasis, or use a bright color such as yellow text when normal body text is white. Underlined text is not recommended as it is hard to see.
D. Color and Contrast
Make good use of color and contrast. Dark backgrounds tend to be easier to view, especially with light text and graphics. These days with brighter projectors, light background slides work fine too, If you use a light background, use black or very dark text and graphics. Do not use yellow of lighter colors for text.
Maintain consistency throughout your slides. Using the same background color, text size, text color, and uniform fonts throughout all the slides makes it easier for the audience to follow the flow of your ideas.
E. Templates
Following are templates in Powerpoint (ppt, pptx, pot, potx) and in Keynote (key, kth). Feel free to use and modify.
Guidelines about Speaking/Presenting
Being able to stand in front of an audience an convey your message, and in this case, your research methodology, results and findings is no trivial matter. We expect all of you to take this task seriously and come prepared for a high-quality oral presentation, representative of your research, that resulted in an ORAL presentation at CVPR. Following are a few sites we have gathered to help you understand, appreciate, and more importantly learn from, to aid you in giving the best ORAL presentation possible.
- “How to Speak“ Lecture Tips (in Video) by Patrick Winston from Harvard University. [A real classic about how to give lectures in academic environments. Highly recommended.]
- “Better Public Speaking and Presentations” by mindtools.com.
- “20 Tips for better conference speaking” by Cameron Moll.
- “How to Rapidly Improve Speaking Skills” by Phillip Yaffe, for ACM Ubiquity.
- “Articles on Public Speaking” by Advanced Public Speaking Institute
- “Speech Anxiety”, “Public Speaking Panic Control Tips” by Barbara Morris
- “Things I hope to not See or Hear at SIGGRAPH” by Jim Blinn (An excerpt from the indispensable book Jim Blinn’s Corner: A Trip Down The Graphics Pipeline). [Though for SIGGRAPH, these are great guidelines for any Conference Presentation.]
- “Scoring Power Points” by Jamie McKenzie