---
# System prepended metadata

title: '  <!-- ### What to include in '

---

## Talk Checklist
### (W)hat to do:
- [ ] - [W] Motivation: Start broad, why should we care about this problem, what are the prior work -- the kind of things people have studied, and the payoff -- so what if someone solves this?  
- [ ]  - [W] Problem statement.  
- [ ] - [W/H] Core Result -- Tell people as soon as possbile what the core results/end goal of your talk are. What will you show.  
- [ ] -  [W] Define everything you write down. It's ok (most time good) to be informal, but the essence of the definition should be captured. If possbile, draw a picture even if it is obvious.  
- [ ] - [W] Understand the idea of the paper. What's so innovative there? Challenging goal: What did they do new/innovative that other people in the past missed?  
- [ ] -  [W] Assumptions: Tell all the essential assumptions, i.e., that are fundamentally used in the proof. 
    - (i) Are they reasonable assumptions?
    - (ii) Where do they help?
    - (iii) Do you need to present each of the assumption or are some assumptions just not important conceptually?  
- [ ] - [W] Your goal is NOT to present everything, nor to show off. Your aim is to make your audience understand/get a feel of a major concept, so you have to decide what to present and what to skip. That said, do not skip simple "sanity checks". 

### (H)ow to do:

- [ ] -  [H] Have a running example throught your talk. E.g., finding community size in a simple random graph, etc. Show what your theorem/definitions would mean in this particular example.   
- [ ] -  [H] Try to workout a claim in a simple example, to help the audience do some sanity check of the claim/theorem.
- [ ] -  [H]  Lots of pictures. Picture speaks a thousand words. Have lots of pictures in your proofs, and definitions to show whats going on. 
- [ ] -  [H] Do not over-crowd a slide. 
- [ ] -  [H] Spend a 1-2 minutes per slide at the least. Give people time to absorb information. Your goal is not only to finish the presentation in time, but also make your audience understand. 

- [ ] -  [H] Don't present what you pretend to understand. If you want to present it anyway, just be upfront and say that you don't understand it but the authors claim so and so. 

- [ ] -  [H] Present proofs as a story. Need the high-level picture of the proof. Tell the audience the high-level approach of the proof.
    -  (i) Break proof into parts. Step-by-step thinking
    -  (ii) Given proof summary both in the beginning and end
    -  (iii) For complicated proofs, always recall what we did in the previous step and what we are going to do next. 
    -  (iv) Stitch everything together like a "story"
     
- [ ] - [H] If possible, try to relate the proofs/techniques with what was done in the class. 

- [ ] - [H] Audience is not comfortable with the things you are presenting. Give them time, give them examples, and give them pictures. 
- [ ] - [H] When showing experiment, get a high-quality image from ArXiV source or zoom in and take a screen shot. Read out loud the plots slowly (and do not forget to label and read out the axes). Tell things like: lower the better, etc. Make your axes visible from distance. 
- [ ] - [H] The audience and questions are friendly. Be kind, and do not be dismissive/defensive. Engage with curiousity with the audience. Don't pretend to know what you don't. When asked a question, try to reason out loud. It's ok if you are wrong, but reason clearly. 

[-----Setup-----][-----------------Story-----------------][-Conc-][----Future----]



