How to prepare as presenter

Prepare a short (one page) “resources” document (ideally in markdown) that gives a very short summary of the paper / the topic of the presentation, lists any resources that you found that could be helpful in understanding it (blog posts, video recordings of conference presentation, slides, links to publicly available implementations, etc.; but don’t strive for exhaustivity here, include only really helpful resources, and none if you couldn’t find any). Send this to me by the end of Sunday of the week before your presentation, so that I can circulate it to the other participants.

When leading the discussion:

Tell us about how the paper is structured. What are the sections, and what is happening in each? Why do you think did they order the sections in this way?

Try to extract the problem formulation first. What problem did the authors (say they) tackle(d)? How is that motivated, why is this an important problem?

How does the work build on previous work? What (do the authors say) was the state of the art at the time of writing? What was missing?

What is the essence of the proposed model? Try to

How is the proposed model evaluated?

What do the authors say are the strengths, and what are the weaknesses of the model?

Finally, you may add some comments or doubts: Could it have been evaluated in a more telling way? Was there something that the authors overlooked? Was there something that could have been explained better, and if so, how? Did you get ideas for something that could be tried, either improvements on the same problem, or applications of the same method to another problem?

Connect the paper to its future: Was it taken up in later work? (Do a google scholar search to see who has cited it.)

You can prepare slides to support this, but don’t go over board and turn this into your own creative presentation. (There will be other opportunities for that.)