[PRL] Comments about today's roundtable

Richard Cobbe cobbe at ccs.neu.edu
Tue Oct 30 19:50:10 EDT 2007


After listening to the various 5-minute summaries at today's meeting with
J Strother Moore, I have a couple of comments about some things I observed.
While I don't want to belabor these points, I think it's important to have
feedback after such things so that we can all learn from the process and
improve our presence in such settings.

First, several folks had difficulty targeting their summary to someone
who's not a language researcher.  It's worth thinking about how to explain
your research to a computer scientist in a different field.  While we're
not, perhaps, likely to encounter such folks at ICFP or POPL, we may end up
in settings where the audience is more diverse.

For instance: those of us who go into academic careers will eventually have
to give a hiring talk, which is generally delivered to the entire
department, so this will come up.  There, we'll have the luxury of looking
up the department's faculty in advance, so we should have some knowledge of
their background and can adjust the presentation accordingly, but we may
not always have this advantage.

I'd like to provide specific tips about how to do this, but I think it
depends too heavily on the particular research topic, so I can't provide
any general suggestions.

Second, I noticed a couple of folks have problems with the technical terms
in their summaries.  Nobody tripped over their words that I could tell, but
some folks introduced technical terms by speaking them much faster and in a
quieter voice than the surrounding speech, almost as if they were
embarrassed about the terms.

This is precisely backwards.  When you get to a technical term for a
concept that's central to your research, slow down and speak, if anything,
slightly louder, especially if your audience isn't already familiar with
the area.  This gives them time to get used to the term and the idea, so
they don't get lost when you move on to the details.  I think this is even
important in cases where your audience *is* familiar with the area: it
highlights the term as a keyword and gives them a chance to realize what
you're talking about and swap in the background for the subject.

I hope folks find this helpful as we continue to refine our presentations
and our professional personas.

Richard



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