Tips for Speakers

The talk for this seminar is intended to be about 30 minutes to leave ample time for discussion afterwards. (The talks of some speakers invited from other universities or research centers may be 1-1.5 hours).

In the past, speakers have asked us what to emphasize in their talks for this seminar. The following is a guideline for talks on algorithms:

• Very good description of the algorithm
  The audience will have people looking at the algorithm from a complexity and implementation perspective as well as performance. It is important to describe the algorithm in enough detail so that implementers can comment on its complexity and bring up other implementation issues. We encourage the speaker to make the heart of his/her talk the description of the algorithm and any methods he/she has devised to decrease its complexity or parallelize it.
• Set-up of the problem
  What are the assumptions? In what application domains do these assumptions hold?
• Clear discussion of performance results
  Define any new performance metrics you introduce and what these metrics would mean in practical applications.
• Why is this algorithm novel and state-of-the-art?
  Some reference to other works and what your algorithm accomplishes over and beyond these previous works.

If you are a speaker and have any questions, please feel free to contact us at any time before your talk.