2   Paper Presentation

The goals for this deliverable are to practice preparing and delivering a concise research presentation and to build an appreciation for the importance of clarity when presenting research.

The structure of a robotics research presentation

Quality research presentations will capture an audience’s attention, motivate them to take an interest in the challenge at hand, demonstrate what knowledge has been generated to solve the challenge, and encourage the audience to extend the presented ideas towards new challenges. For maximum affect, research presentations should be correct, clear, concise, and broadly understandable. Given the challenge of achieving all this, we suggest developing your presentations using the following section structure:

1   Hot Start

The first task of a presenter is to command the attention and interest of their audience. Use a hot start to pique the audience’s interest in your talk. There will always be distrations that a presenter must compete with to keep the audience’s focus, even after a successful hot start.

2   Value Proposition

A clear value proposition will motivate the audience to keep paying attention beyond the hot start. This section of the presentation establishes what benefits can be realized by solving an existing challenge or technical problem. The proposition can be framed in language such as, “if we can solve <this challenge>, we’ll be able to realize <these benefits>.”

3   Approach

A motivated audience will then want to know how the challenge being presented can be solved. This section of the talk should provide background on what factors have made the challenge difficult in the past and the key insights the presenters have discovered to alleviate these factors.

4   Resolution

Given a proposed approach, the presenter should demonstrate how the their insights can be applied to the challenge in question to arrive at a solution. This section should show how the value proposition has been more fully realized towards the desired benefits.

5   Call to Action

At this point in the presentation, a natural question from audience members will be, “how can we build on the insights from this work to better realize the desired benefits?” Hence, this section is the presenter’s opportunity to answer the question before it is even asked.

An Example

As an example of a robotics research presentation, consider Anthony’s presentation from the ECCV 2022 Workshop on Recovering 6D Object Pose. The slides from this presentation can be viewed online and a recording of the corresponding talk is included below:

Expected Presentation Format

Student teams in DeepRob should prepare a 10-minute slide-based oral presentation for their assigned paper as part of the final project. The presentation should include the following structure: background on the problem being addressed, the value proposition, approach and methods, key results, conclusions and directions for future work. Students are expected to use the provided DeepRob Keynote Theme or the provided DeepRob PowerPoint Template for styling your slides.

Presentation Deadline

Students in DeepRob should submit their presentation slides formatted as a PDF at least 3 days prior to their scheduled paper presentation. Students should submit a copy of their slides as a PDF file via email to the course instructor.

Useful Resources

  • How to Give a Great Research Talk: Advice from Simon Peyton Jones, Engineering Fellow at Epic Games.

  • A great resource where you can find recorded research presentations are the recent robotics conferences. For example, the recorded oral presentations from ICRA 2022 and CoRL 2022 can be found online.

  • Oral Presentation Advice: Advice from Professor Mark D. Hill at the University of Wisconsin.