ETP is an event for undergraduates with talent and interest in theoretical computer science, sponsored by the theory groups at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. The purpose of the event is to exchange ideas about exciting results and research directions in theoretical computer science, and enjoy Seattle in all its summer glory.

Anna Karlin is organizing and asked me to join in.  It’s a great group of students and a great excuse to spend some time at UW and MSR.  There have been about 15 technical talks aimed at senior-year, bright undergrads.¹ In an attempt to minimize the time I spend designing talks, I used a new presentation method – Prezi.  I’ve used it before and was perhaps a little too excited about it. As critics would point out, I didn’t take full advantage of Prezi:  I designed this poster² in Illustrator with a tablet, exported to Prezi as swf and then added “frames” in order to navigate around the poster.  Why?  Prezi was frustrating to work with, figures would have to be uploaded one by one, jpegs cannot be uploaded in high enough resolution to zoom in on, uploading a pdf plain failed.  I was worried about (lack of) reusability.  At least now I have a reusable poster.

¹ The level of the talks, at least on topics of which I am the least informed, was perfect for me – a gentle introduction.  Disconcerting, maybe.  Perhaps I am just too slow to follow the standard (short) technical talk in our field.
² Which I hope to print out on a plotter and put up in my department. Look! Pretty pictures!

I broke a lot of standard rules in giving this job talk.  First and foremost, I did not practice it.  *gasp*  Practice would have removed a lot of my “um”s and “uh”s.  In my defence, when I practice a talk too much, I find it gets stale.  However, practicing it once from start-to-finish would have been a good idea.  In watching this talk (as painful as it is), I think the best thing I could have done was to tape myself once.

Second, I climbed on a chair.  I was offered a laser pointer, but I hate laser pointers.  They are hard to keep steady and the point is very small and hard to see for the audience.  I find it about as useful as the speaker pointing to their laptop screen while they give a presentation.  So, at some point I wanted to point at something that too high for me, so I climbed on a chair.

Another minor thing that I wish I would get in the habit of doing is repeating an asked question. Taking two seconds to summarize the question both confirms that you are answering the intended question and allows the entire audience to hear both the question and the answer.

The slides for the talk are available for Keynote and Powerpoint here.