how to make conference slide

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A Generic Conference Talk Outline

This conference talk outline is a starting point, not a rigid template. Most good speakers average two minutes per slide (not counting title and outline slides), and thus use about a dozen slides for a twenty minute presentation.

• Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)
• Forecast (1 slide)
  Give gist of problem attacked and insight found (What is the one idea you want people to leave with? This is the "abstract" of an oral presentation.)
• Outline (1 slide)
  Give talk structure. Some speakers prefer to put this at the bottom of their title slide. (Audiences like predictability.)
• Background
  • Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides)
    (Why should anyone care? Most researchers overestimate how much the audience knows about the problem they are attacking.)
  • Related Work (0-1 slides)
    Cover superficially or omit; refer people to your paper.
  • Methods (1 slide)
    Cover quickly in short talks; refer people to your paper.
• Results (4-6 slides)
  Present key results and key insights. This is main body of the talk. Its internal structure varies greatly as a function of the researcher's contribution. (Do not superficially cover all results; cover key result well. Do not just present numbers; interpret them to give insights. Do not put up large tables of numbers.)
• Summary (1 slide)
• Future Work (0-1 slides)
  Optionally give problems this research opens up.
• Backup Slides (0-3 slides)
  Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total) to answer expected questions. (Likely question areas: ideas glossed over, shortcomings of methods or results, and future work.)

Academic Interview Talks

The rhetorical goal for any interview talk is very different than a conference talk. The goal of a conference talk is to get people interested in your paper and your work. The goal of an interview talk is to get a job, for which interest in your work is one part.
There are two key audiences for an academic interview talk, and you have to reach both. One is the people in your sub-area, who you must impress with the depth of your contribution. The other is the rest of the department, who you must get to understand your problem, why it is important, and a hand-wave at what you did. Both audiences will evaluate how well you speak as an approximation of how well you can teach.
An algorithm:

• Take a 20-minute conference talk.
• Expand the 5 minute introduction to 20 minutes to drive home the problem, why it's important, and the gist of what you've done.
• Do the rest of the conference talk, minus the summary and future work.
• Add 10 minutes of deeper stuff from your thesis (to show your depth). It is okay lose people outside of your sub-area (as long as you get them back in the next bullet).
• Do the summary and future work from the conference talk in a manner accessible to all.
• Add 10 ten minutes to survey all the other stuff you have done (to show your breadth).
• Save 5 minutes for questions (to show that you are organized).

Other Talks

Other talks should be prepared using the same principles of considering audience and rhetorical purpose. A presentation on a project in a graduate class, for example, seeks to reach the professor first and fellow students second. Its purpose is to get a good grade by impressing people that a quality project was done. Thus, methods should be described in must more detail than for a conference talk.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jim Goodman, Jim Larus, and David Patterson for their useful comments. The current on-line version of this document appears at URL "http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/conference-talk.html".