How to give a great scientific talk
nature.com
nature.com
There's an interesting point buried here (emphasis mine):
> Presenters often fail because they try to deliver too much complex information. Language and content, normally, has to be designed with the non-specialist SCIENTIST in mind. “You have to think about the least knowledgeable person in your audience THAT YOU CARE ABOUT REACHING” says Rubenson.
If you are presenting a breakthrough in compilers in a compilers workshop, maybe you don't want to start your talk explaining what a compiler is. Step 0 of every presentation should be "know your audience", and if your audience is expecting complex information you will have to get into details at some point.
That doesn't mean that elitism is a good thing. I think both beginners and professionals should walk our of your talk understanding something new. And a good scientific presentation should be also a good presentation. But with limited time (major conferences implemented 20 minutes talks this year), you need to set your baseline knowledge somewhere.
I come from a Biology background so maybe its different, but I have been to so many talks where 90% of the audience is grad students and looking around the room you can tell none of them are getting anything out of the talk because they got lost in the first five minutes. Sure it would be silly for every Neuroscience talk to waste five minutes explaining what a brain is, but even seasoned scientists seem to take for granted that not everyone studies their same corner of the field. Giving sufficient background info is severely underrated in talks, as is very explicitly stating ideas that will be necessary to appreciate the core thesis of the talk is. I'm sympathetic to the fact that timing is tight and scientists want to save a significant amount of time for their actual research, but if most of the room comes away from the talk with absolutely nothing then it was a wasted effort. You're right that the presenter should know their audience and that would fix things, its just that in my experience, the presenter is almost always overestimating their audience.
"...I remembered an MIT colloquium that took place in the late fifties; it was one of the first I attended at MIT. The speaker was Eugenio Calabi. Sitting in the front row of the audience were Norbert Wiener, asleep as usual until the time came to applaud, and Dirk Struik who had been one of Calabi's teachers when Calabi was an undergraduate at MIT in the forties. The subject of the lecture was beyond my competence. After the first five minutes I was completely lost. At the end of the lecture, an arcane dialogue took place between the speaker and some members of the audience, Ambrose and Singer if I remember correctly. There followed a period of tense silence. Professor Struik broke the ice. He raised his hand and said: "Give us something to take home!" Calabi obliged, and in the next five minutes he explained in beautiful simple terms the gist of his lecture. Everybody filed out with a feeling of satisfaction.
Dirk Struik was right: a speaker should try to give his audience something they can take home. But what? ..."
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le...
Not in my graduate school experience. Presenting was often viewed as "display my research while I read from my research".
Say, I'm computer vision researcher specializing in (non-deep learning) 3D reconstruction. Why would I be listening to talks where someone goes into some esoteric tweaks they made to the deep learning stuff? I feel like there almost should be separate conferences for people doing feature recognition/tracking, 3d reconstruction, object recognition etc., as all those fields are vast in themselves. And, once you're on such conference, it's just the experts there and you don't need the 5 minute intros any more.
Again, I don't know if this is something that is only true in Biological science and less so in Computer Science, but while I agree most research is a minor incremental improvement, its often on a topic so specialized that most outside of your research group aren't very familiar with the intricacies.
This begs the question, like you said, then why would you care about hearing that talk? Maybe you don't even care about their thesis and are just interested in adapting a technique they used in your own work. Or maybe their thesis bridges a gap between two fields of study that were previously not very closely linked. Besides, when you're trying to communicate your work to other people, isn't it to your advantage to try and cast as wide of a net as possible? Isn't part of the point of talks and conferences to widen people's spheres a bit? There's no need to leave your home lab if you want to converse with people who understand most of what you're researching already.
Sometimes the students aren't the targets. They're just guests. The speaker is targeting the handful of senior people in the audience.
> ...as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides...
One thing I suggest to folks, if there is some insecurity about not covering "everything", is to make some slides on detailed sub-topics that aren't included in the main talk but are intended to be used when/if there's a follow-up question.
If the speaker is careful, they can even "bait" their talk to implicitly suggest follow-up questions for which a detailed auxiliary slide has been prepared.
Not before we're all offended to death.
Generally in life I tend to overestimate people's technical level -- maybe not of computers, which change a lot, but basic statistics and finance, general knowledge, etc. This is why: "brains" only get you so far in life, but being an intellectual-type person one wants to believe that those more succesful than you are even brainier than you.
Some people work out their arms so much their legs are comparatively small. These people are not about to become star athletes. I wonder if they look at olympic sprinters or soccer players and think "what great arms this guys must have, I wouldn't want to wrestle with them".
My personal pet peeve of nearly every astronomy documentary/talk/youtube video is that they have to explain what black holes are. By aiming at a way to general audience it wastes the time of the (usually) 99.9% who understand it at least as well as the somewhat brief description they include.
This type of slide has a complete sentence at the top that makes a substantive assertion. Then the rest of the slide contains evidence for that assertion usually in the form of a diagram, chart or table. This type of slide is the backbone of a scientific presentation.
Generally, Alley's book is extremely useful.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critic...
1. State the problem (and convince the audience it matters) before rushing to present a solution.
2. Know the background of your audience, and figure out how well they need to know the background to get something out of your talk.
And to the grad students: sometimes, when one only has 10-15 minutes to give a talk, it is hard to give one that makes sense to junior members of the audience and still speak to the experts. Don't give up! and don't be shy about asking speakers questions afterwards. Sure, there are some people who think they are too important to talk to grad students (or even faculty) they don't know. The worst you get from asking such people a questions is you get brushed off (don't worry, they're not likely to remember who you are, and it's not likely to have a negative impact on your career). But more often people are happy to go into details, and/or put you in touch with the postdoc / grad student who knows all the gory details, etc. etc.
Exactly. A presentation that is about a "what" or "how" often should start with the "why". The audience needs to care about what is being presented, and often the best way to do that is to remind them why they should care.
Amusingly, this is itself also a talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw
1. Tell people why the work excites you. 2. Make sure that everyone in the room learns something.
Make sure your slides support your story, and make sure they do not distract from the presenter.
www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf
My key advice is to gear the talk to the audience and context. A TED talk will have a completely different presentation style than an academic conference where people might be actually interested in the more nitty gritty details.
> Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.
I think it comes from people padding their talks to fit within a certain time frame. Or perhaps, some speakers have realized that enough audience members utterly tune-out during the talk and need to be reminded of what the talk was about just as they're waking-up and getting ready for the next meeting. Somehow it got drilled into people that this is a necessary structure, but it is not!
Much better, I think, to remove material from the talk to the point where the speaker is making one, maybe two interesting assertions that are supported succinctly. Every talk should leave time for discussion.
1. Breathe! This is easier said than done when you are caught in an anxiety driven feedback loop where your breadth gets more shallow making you even more anxious. Halt this process by taking deep breadths.
2. Limit caffeine. Caffeine exacerbates feelings of anxiety especially in public speaking scenarios.
3. Beware of ruminating and catastrophic thoughts. You don't need to fight or eliminate them. In fact, doing so may make anxious feelings worse. But in a kind and compassionate manner towards yourself, just acknowledge they are there and the role that anxiety may play in those negative thoughts. Moreover, if you really do screwup the presentation, with some time no one will remember. We can recall great speeches but rarely terrible ones.
4. Attend a local public speaking club such as toastmasters (plug here for Speakeasy II here in Boulder, Colorado). Regularly speaking in front of audiences will take you through the desensitization process and over time giving a speech in front of a group of people will seem not so scary.
Dan Britt - Orbits and Ice Ages: The History of Climate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM
Obviously, I think this is a great talk since I find the topic interesting too. There is probably not much you can do if your audience is uninterested in the first place.
https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(09)0...
+1. Practice out loud, rewrite, practice out loud again, rewrite, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Also: let a real person listen to your talk at least once while rehearsing. (Tip: use spouse, if available)
And native British English speakers can have a larger disadvantage in getting understood, among people who know English well but are not used to British accents. I was recently in a workshop where I had no trouble understanding the talks given by Chinese, Finnish, German, Indian, Russian, Swedish and whatever speakers. But a native British person, I really had to concentrate because they spoke fast and with a heavy accent. American accents I always find easy, though.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-spe...
That might possibly be due to the hegemony of the American movie/television industry? In my case, I know that a majority of the English-spoken entertainment I consume is American-made, so much that British English now gives me a distinct, "exotic" feeling.
"Why British Singers Lose Their Accent When Singing"
American accents have as many weird dropping of sounds, adding of extra sounds, and other little curiosities compared to the written version as any other accent does.
For example a non-geographic-specific American accent pronounces 'water' as 'warder', 'butter' as 'budder', and 'duty' as 'doody' - it's definitely taking things away and adding things and not just being neutral.
Less intonations.
There's no such thing. It may be the case that most commercial music is sung in approximately a General American (or maybe sometimes the otherwise largely deceased affected Mid-Atlantic) accent, but that's probably more about commercial market appeal than anything else.
> The British accent contains more intonations, which one cannot use when the intonations are dictated by the music.
It's quite possible to sing music in any of a number of British accents.
Not every authoritative-sounding youtube video actually contains informative content.
Also, it's obviously entirely possible to sing in a British accent. Even an exaggerated one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXqYajt67J4
I think song lyrics are often easier to understand than ordinary speech just because they're slower, independent of accent. For example, I find it easier to understand Spanish in songs than I do when someone is speaking at a normal conversational pace.
Then I saw Life on Mars.