Presentation | Seminar

Location and Time

Usually, presentations take place on Friday mornings between 9:00 and 12:00 in the LDV seminar room Z995. (Subject to modification.)

You will receive the detailed information in the invitation to the respective date. 

Duration

The individual duration is dependent on the kind of work / thesis:

Presentation Date

It is your responsibility to find a suitable presentation date with your supervisor. Often students contact the supervisors with deadlines for their progress control. Your supervisor won't be aware of such dates, which is why it is your job to inform them as soon as possible. The presence of Prof. Diepold for the presentation is mandatory so finding a date should be planned early enough. Contact your supervisor four weeks before your submission date.

Template

Power Point German: TUM LDV Präsentation DE

Power Point English:  TUM LDV Presentation EN

Google Slides German: here

Google Slides English: here

The chair-specific Latex presentation template can be found here.

The TUM-general templates can be found here.

Content

A good presentation should cover several elements. The main goal of the presentation is to summarize your work and most important results to those who haven't read your work. The content should be limited to the topics covered in the written documentation. Additional information such as company history or your personal life should not be part of the lecture.

The structure of the presentation is similar to the written document. It should include the problem statement and what you worked on. This serves as motivation for your work as well as an introduction to the topic. You should not present a comprehensive literary overview here. Focus on your results and on short and concise main points which explain the current state of the art and what your contribution exactly is. If your work is pure implementation work, then your contribution lies in validating results or performance measurement of the implementation for example. "Negative" results are also results. Data manipulation and omission are not scientific and strictly forbidden.

After presenting the problem statement and your contribution as well as your methodology for solving the problem, describe your result analysis extensively. Is your result an implementation, an algorithm, or some sort of hardware construction? If it is the latter, a live demonstration would be fitting. Keep in mind that any live demonstration is a potential pitfall, in case it does not work. A backup video should be on hand.

The visual preparation in terms of graphs, tables, figures and diagrams are even more essential in your presentation. They should be easy to read and understand. Your entire presentation should be result-oriented which means you only present results and substantial methodologies. Your debugging process or other heart-breaking stories should not be included.

Design your presentation slides with a program of your choice (for example Powerpoint, LaTeX, LibreOffice Impress, and others). Remind yourself during the process that this is a scientific presentation and therefore, a certain seriousness is expected. The Prezi program can sometimes give a wrong playful impression if used incorrectly. The slides should support your presentation but not replace it (too much text on the slides). The rule of thumb says more than 13 lines of text including the title on one slide will overwhelm the listener. Use indentations and colours to give the structure of your slides. Acknowledgement and farewell stories feature on the last slide. Do not ask the listeners for questions as it gives the impression that your presentation is incomplete and questions are necessary to clarify the points you mentioned.

Your slides should include these elements:

• slide number
• presentation title
• fitting titles for every slide

You should not prepare handouts for your presentation. Slides should be submitted to your supervisor 2-3 days prior to the presentation date. Schedule a rehearsal with them as well. On the day of the presentation, test your presentation with the projector in the seminar room. If you do not have a laptop, inform your supervisor or seminar organizer. If you need a speaker or something similar, you also have to contact them. (Currently, this would be testing presenting via zoom.)

Checklist

• Arrange an appointment with your supervisor for a rehearsal presentation. Familiarize with zoom and screen-sharing!
• Submit your presentation to the host at least one day before the presentation date. An Upload Link will be provided. Later submissions cannot be accepted. Permissible formats are Powerpoint or PDF documents. Name your files properly so that they can be assigned to you.
• The display format is a standard Full-HD resolution with 1920x1080 pixels which corresponds to an aspect ratio of 16:9. Choose your slide layout accordingly.

Presentation Tips

• Nerves at the start are expected and hard to control. Preparing and memorizing the text for the first few slides is helpful. You ensure a good start by doing that. First impressions are crucial as you know.
• Your presentation is bad if you are reading off the slides.
• Use both hands when moving the laser pointer.
• When you are practising your presentation, make sure to pronounce words loud and clear. Whispering in front of your laptop screen is not good preparation. Thinking takes less time than speaking.
• Never ask for questions

Common Mistakes (warning: this is meant to be read sarcastically)

• Speak softly, the content of your presentation is intended only for the ears of the examiner. In the back of the room, no one should understand your words.
• Under no circumstances turn towards the audience and never make eye contact. 
• Do not try to motivate the audience for your topic and do not give any general conditions or reasons for your work. 
• Overdraw your presentation time and don't take a watch in order to completely lose all sense of time.
• After your presentation, ask if there are any questions from the audience, as you know exactly that you have worked incorrectly and concealed important information.
• Overload your slides with words and read them aloud, as nobody in the plenary can do anything with descriptive graphics.
• Write in very small letters or leave out any inscriptions at all.
• Under no circumstances should you explain what can be seen in your graphics. All listeners are totally familiar with the results of your work and can interpret 10.000 tiny coloured lines independently within 2 seconds.
• Prepare at least 100 slides, as you will be able to speak faster during the presentation and thus fill in your presentation time with certainty.
• Use at least 50% of your presentation to introduce the company where you did the work.
• Explain in detail all tools used like operating systems, computers, buildings, lunches, work routes, ...
• Thank all people who were involved in your work. Especially distant relatives, bosses, colleagues and pets deserve special recognition in your presentation.
• Assume that the audience is just waiting to watch your cleanly polished C++ classes or code snippets and be enlightened about the meaning of each semicolon.
• Don't worry about what the audience might be interested in. They are used to being confronted with any number of detailed facts. If they don't find the central theme, they don't deserve it.
• Use as many buzz words as possible that the audience has certainly never heard before. You support the popular Buzz-Word-Bingo of the PhD candidates.
• Do not inform yourself beforehand whether the technical terms you use really apply and insist that you know how a "deconvolution" works.
• Leave the audience unclear as to which of the presented elements represent your work and what was not done by you or was already present before you were even born. 
• Give a detailed outlook about everything you have not achieved in your work and what might, at some point, under better circumstances and weather conditions, if there is still time left in any case, totally needs to be done to make everything even more beautiful, better, bigger and greater ...
• Do not care if you can explain the used abbreviations. Why should anybody be interested in what these three letters stand for?
• Present a bog-standard outline that could be copied to any arbitrary presentation since you do not want to attract attention.
• Skip your title page as fast as possible. Your title holds at least fifty words, what else could be there to explain?