Final Project Presentation

Counts towards 10% of your final grade

Due: in class April 17th or April 24th
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
Your entire talk, and each section of your talk should be organized as:
1. High level introduction
2. Details
3. Summary
Your talk should be organized similar to the following (the number of slides is a intended as
rough guideline):
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)
o Details of the problem you are solving
o Details of your solution

o 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.
o Use at least one picture to explain your solution and/or implementation
o 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)
o Explain the tests you performed (and why), and explain how you gathered the
data
o 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.
o 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)
o Conclude with the main ideas and results of your work.
o 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.
Also, look at the paper presentation guidlines for more hints for preparing your talk.