A note to the presenter...
We hope you are excited to present at this fascinating invited-talk opportunity.
Prior to presentation, please make sure to provide the following materials at least one week before your talk.
1) Slides for a 20-minute talk to an educational non-specialist audience from the ECE department. Please refer to the slides and presentation guideline here.
2) A short video (of duration 1 minute) to advertise your talk (optional but highly recommended) that captures the highlights of your research. This video will be used in inviting audience for your talk. A sample video is given here.
We may upload the slides to the forum website and the short video to our youtube channel based on your preference.
After your talk, you will receive a hand-written feedback form from audience and a certificate appreciating your talk. We will also record your presentation should you prefer watching yourself presenting (again optional). Please contact us atleast a couple of days prior presentation, if you prefer not to be video-taped.
Earlier, NEPSSS sessions had presentation followed by the Q&A. The feedback to the presenters are given as forms filled by the audience. Inorder to make the feedbacks more efficient, the NEPSSS committee modified the session format to include a feedback and comments section after the Q&A section. The faculty bench and the audience would speak out their opinion and the possibilities of improvement in the talk. This new feature would enable the speakers to evaluate their presentation skills and research direction instantly.
Putting together a talk that is sufficiently broad but also sufficiently technically interesting is *hard* to do well. It takes practice (one of the reasons for this seminar series is to give you some practice at it). But will be a very useful skill as your careers move forward and it will certainly make your NEPSSS talk more successful if you can manage to pull it off.
The audience is quite broad, across all of ECE. Thus you should NOT expect the audience to have more than a quite general background related to the topic of your talk, and you should NOT expect them to have any idea why what you are doing is interesting / relevant / important.
Think back, for example, to what you knew when you finished your undergraduate degree about parts of the ECE field that you were not that interested in as an undergraduate, and then add several years of decay in that knowledge from concentrating intensively on a different part of the field --- that is what you should expect the starting point of your audience to be !!!
This means that it is up to YOU as the speaker to
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Explain / convince / interest them about why your topic is something they should want to know about
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Bring them along technically from that "generally literate" starting point to whatever you want them to understand or at least appreciate technically about your topic
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Your abstract (and the short video abstract if you chose to make one is your chance to attract your audience and get them interested beforehand, so it too should pay attention to that starting point. Write them to be a bit broader in their appeal by making more clear why the topic is of interest and importance.
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It also might be helpful to have your adviser look at your plans and slides if they have not done so, with the same goal in mind of being sure they are broad enough to appeal to this whole audience.
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Be very careful about abbreviations and acronyms
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If you have any questions about this, or want some of us to review your slides or planning for your talk beforehand, let us know and we can try to arrange for that.
Please feel free to contact us at NEPSSSOC@google.com. Looking forward to see you in your presentation!