How to give a “good” seminar

These days it is very important to make an impression during a seminar. In this page I have collected a bunch of techniques on how students can give a “good” technical seminar:

  • General demeanor: There are, generally speaking, two approaches:

    • Being extremely enthusiastic and brimming with confidence, which works wonders because looks matter: the audience keeps wondering and giving the benefit of the doubt.

    • Wearing an absolutely disinteresed look, which works wonders because the audience gets the impression that the speaker is so bored with the material because they know it like the back of their hands.

  • Title

    • Every seminar should begin with a title slide, and the rule of thumb is that at least 70% of the words in the title (excluding the prepositions) should be unfamiliar to at least 70% of your audience. One of the first words in the title should be ‘novel’ because only novel matters are worth talking about. Moreover, a suitable permutation of the words, ‘adaptive’, ‘neural’, ‘fuzzy’, ‘stable’, ‘stochastic’, and ‘deep’ should appear in the title.

  • Figures and diagrams

    • Captions should be given at the top as opposed to the bottom, and they should be written in an extremely small font; that way, by the time that people figure out the contents of the caption, the speaker has had ample opportunity to move to the following slide.

    • Axes should never be labelled; in case any anyone from the audience conjectures that the horizontal axis is time, that person can be immediately and curtly corrected for having taken leave of their senses --- who confuses time with space!

    • Linewidth in technical figures should either be so thin as to challenge the viewers' imagination and keep their attention focussed on the figure, or so thick that multiple lines overlap and confuse the readers for good measure. Colored figures are still difficult to reproduce in journal publications, and therefore, it makes perfect sense to adhere to thin/thick black lines on white background for all the data.

    • Different sets of data points on figures must be represented with clarity, and the symbols \(-\), \(+\), \(\times\), \(\div\), \(\pm\), \(\mp\), \(\star\), and \(\ast\) should be used to depict them in increasing order of complexity; for precision one should use \(\cdot\).

    • Legends in figures can be misleading, it is better to get rid of them.

To be continued.