CS885 Winter 2022 - Reinforcement Learning

Paper Presentation

• 20% of final grade

Format

• Put yourself in the shoes of the author(s) and present the paper as if it was your own
• Length: 20-30 minutes
• Presentation is done individually (i.e., no team)
• Create a video by recording your presentation at home. It is sufficient to create a set of slides and then to record a narration of your slides. Tip: to help viewers focus on the right part of each slide while you are talking, use the mouse or a virtual laser pointer to draw the attention of the viewers to what you are explaining. Here is a (non-exauhstive) list of affordable software to record and edit videos:
  • Keynote: you can record narrations directly in keynote. Advantage: you can record one slide at a time and keynote is free. Here is a tutorial for recording presentations in keynote.
  • Powerpoint: you can record narrations directly in powerpoint. Advantage: you can record one slide at a time and you can change a slide without having to re-record the narration. Here is a tutorial for recording presentations in powerpoint. You will need a desktop version of powerpoint. At the moment, a personal subscription to Microsoft 365 costs $8/month.
  • Zoom: you can record your desktop with narrations and a video of yourself directly in Zoom. Advantage: free. Here is a tutorial that explains how to record presentations.
  • OpenShot: open source video editor where you can post-process any video (trim sections, combine various tracks, add overlays) on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). Advantage: free. Here is a tutorial that explains the basic features available in OpenShot.
  • Screencast-o-matic: record and edit videos. Advantage: professional comprehensive software for both recording and editing. You can record your desktop with narrations and a video of yourself. You can also postprocess the resulting videos (trim sections, combine various tracks, add overlays). There are several tutorials that explain how to record and edit videos. While you can record videos of up to 15 minutes for free, a subscription of US$1.65/month allows you to record videos of any length and to edit them.
• Deadline: Friday (11:59pm) before the week in which the paper is scheduled (see schedule). Upload your video to YouTube and submit a sharable link with your slides via LEARN. Pascal will post your slides and link your video on the course website during the week end to ensure that they can be viewed during the week in which the paper is scheduled (see schedule).

Suggested structure for the presentation

Introduction

• What is the paper about?
• What is the problem tackled?
• What is the solution proposed?

Background

• Explain the problem tackled
• Explain necessary background

Content of paper

• Explain proposed solution at a high level
• Explain advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solution
• Relate the solution to other work

Empirical evaluation

• Summarize the empirical evaluation
• Highlight anything that's special

Conclusion

• What are the contributions?
• What is the take home message?
• What are possible extensions for future work?