What I have been doing
Sam Sidebotham, Josh Kisnorbo and I presented during the student showcase at PyConAU in August. We also did the same presentation for Young ICT Explorers (YICTE) last week. The actual creation of the presentation was quite chaotic, so I will provide an outline in this post. The video is embedded below.
How did we make the presentation
To provide some context, at the time I had not done an engaging presentation live in 3+ years, as all the presentations I did for school were mostly done on video due to COVID, even when I went back to physical classes, the teachers usually allowed video submissions. Needless to say, I was nervous about presenting at PyCon - my first presentation in 3 years was going to be at a national conference. To feel better about this, I wanted to be ready to present ~ a week before the presentation, however this would prove very difficult.
A combination of realising my archaic block matching techniques would not produce a good result, and trying to salvage it led me to not having written a single slide when we were flying out to Adelaide. Sam had written his part, and Josh was in a similar situation to me. Once we got into our hotel on thursday (we were presenting the next day), we essentially spent the whole day just practicing the presentation. I did not write the slides, or write a script beforehand, I just talked about Winston’s computer vision systems, and the presentation started to write itself.
This style of presentation was something I had never tried, and never been taught. I usually develop a script and fail to memorise it, so it was so much easier to just write the slides around things I wanted to talk about, and then talk about them on stage - even if I changed the wording slightly each time.
This style of presentation helped our group to present after just one day of practice. Our individual parts were only 4-ish minutes each, but I am still proud of preparing in such a short time, especially since I was so nervous a week before the presentation I considered bailing.
Reception of the presentation
The feedback we received on the presentation was positive, mainly regarding how engaging it was. As seen in the video, there were a number of jokes and graphics that kept audience retention high throughout. Most people enjoyed it, but personally I am a little disappointed with the level of content displayed during the presentation.
We only had 10 minutes for the entire presentation, so it was impossible to be both engaging and show extraneous detail. For my part of the presentation, I needed to outline the purpose of the vision systems, and show my approach to solving the problem, which left little time to discuss block-matching, which is where most of my research has gone into. I talked about the general idea of block matching, but was not able to talk about specifics such as different matching cost functions, as there was simply not enough time.
If our group were to go back and present at PyCon again, we would need to apply for the main showcase, which means we would have around 10 minutes each to present. With 10 minutes, I would be able to discuss using neural networks as a cost function, optimised search paths, hierarchical matching - whatever my final model is based on.
What I learnt
The main takeaway from this experience is that in future I should not be as concerned about future presentations because it cannot be worse than presenting at a national conference with only one day worth of practice. Instead of writing a script and frantically trying to memorise it, I can just practice the general idea of what I am going to say and present it without knowing the exact wording of what I am going to say.
I took this idea to heart when presenting this again for YICTE. About 2 hours before presenting for YICTE, we found out that the presentation was only meant to run for 5 minutes, not the 10 minutes we previously assumed. This meant we had to cut some content, and practice speaking fast. We managed to get the presentation down to about 6 minutes, which was within their range of tolerance for timing. The judges seemed quite impressed with our work, and we had a good conversation. I have quite a number of presentations coming up for school assignments, including for my final robotics and data science projects, and I am feeling much more confident now about my ability to give a quality presentation.
Reflection
How are you going with the reflection journal schedule?
Last semester I got status for IT, meaning I did not get a grade for my reflection journals. This is unfortunate because I wrote a few really high quality reflection journals. I have done the same this semester, and it would be a real shame if I did not get a grade for them. I was staying on-top of submitting two reflection journals a week up until PyConAU where directly after I had exams, and then the week after that I had the AST, and after that my IT teacher was away. I fell into a bit of a slump during this time, and focused on other things, but I am back now.