IS 596 / Mid-term Project Presentations

Mid-term Project Presentations

In the week of Oct. 18 of class, you will give an oral mid-term presentation on your project. In the presentation, you should be able to show substantial progress, give evidence that the main functionality of your project is working and show some initial results.

Each talk will occupy 20-25 minutes , followed by 5-10 minutes for discussions, questions, comments, and transition. Given the time limit, you must stick carefully to your message, and practice your talk multiple times with your group members. Each team member should speak for a portion of the presentation time. Keep in mind that you have been thinking about your project for a while, but your audience has not. So, it is best to start with a big picture of your project (e.g., background, motivation, etc.) and explain the overall objective and the structure of the system that you have built before going into technical details.

Your talk should be accompanied by 15-20 carefully prepared slides. You may use any tools that you like to create slides, but you are recommended to email a draft of your slides to me in PDF or PPTX at least three days before your presentation so that I can take a look and give you some feedback if needed. After that, please email me the final version of your slides by Noon on the day of your presentation .

Use your slides to back up what you say to the audience. Don't just write out the words that you plan to say; that gets odd quickly. Instead, give a diagram of the components of your system and describe how they interact. Or, give a screenshot of your system in action and explain what it is doing. Or, give a code snippet on the screen and explain what is interesting about it.

A typical structure of the talk would include: Introduction/Motivation, Overview/Challenges, States-of-the-Arts/Related Work, Methods, Initial Results and Discussions, Plan of Actions for Remaining Milestones. Please do a few dry runs as a group to make sure the presentation flows well and meets the above time requirement.

Finally, be considerate of your classmates -- be present at all of the class sessions, ask thoughtful questions about these exciting projects and finish an evaluation/feedback form of all presentations except your own.

A four-page mid-term project report will be due by Friday Oct. 22, Noon. See instructions on Project Webpage.

Grading

Your grade will be based on the following rubric:
  • Does the presentation adequately cover all aspects of the project: the objective or problem to be solved, the structure and technologies used, one or more interesting challenges, the initial result of the work, and a plan for next steps?
  • Has substantial progress on the project been made? Is the main functionality working correctly?
  • Are the slides prepared with care, including at least one excellent diagram that shows the structure of the system and how the components interact?
  • Is the oral presentation clear and logical, with each group member participating, and completing the presentation within the time limit?
  • Did the project members attend everyone else's talks, ask appropriate questions and give helpful feedback?
  • Schedule


    IS 596 / Mid-term Project Presentations