1   Project Proposal Presentation

The goals for this deliverable are to practice preparing and delivering a concise presentation in which you and your team will propose a research project related to Deep Learning and Robot Perception. Project proposal presentations are scheduled to take place during the seminar portion of the course (Discussion 10).

The structure of a robotics research proposal 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 or is proposed to be 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   Background

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. How have others tried to solve this problem? If it is a new problem, what approaches might be applicable or why are none applicable?

4   Proposed Approach

After setting up background context on related work, presenters should describe their key insights and the ideas they propose to develop and evaluate as a potential solution. The proposed approach may involve combining multiple techniques in a new way, in-depth analysis of an existing approach that isn’t fully understood, providing new datasets for benchmarking, or some other work that will contribute to the stated project motivation.

5   Project Plan

Given a proposed approach, the presenter should lay out a course of action to achieve their research project’s goals. Ideally, the plan will describe a timetable with project milestones and expected results.

Expected Presentation Format

Student teams in DeepRob should prepare a 5-minute slide-based oral presentation for their assigned paper as part of the final project. The presentation should include the following structure: motivation relating to robotics and deep learning, background on the problem being addressed, the value proposition, approach and methods, and project timeline. 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 the scheduled paper presentation date of April 1, 2025. Students should submit a copy of their slides as a PDF file via the course canvas.

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.