Seminar Guidelines

Registration

Procedure

Each participant (or eventually: participant group) chooses a topic, deals with it and prepares a presentation. Literature will be given, but it can also be extended by the participant. All talks will be presented back-to-back at one or two days. After the presentation, each student will write an overview article on the chosen topic.

The preparation of the presentation occurs together with the supervisor. A meeting with the supervisor will take place one week before the talk at the latest. For the talk, students should provide slides as well as an one-page abstract for each participant of the course. All current documents (including a draft of the written report) should be brought along to this meeting electronically and on paper.

The aforementioned draft of the written report is commented/corrected by the supervisor. It will be sent back to the student in sufficient time. Thus, the student has the possibility to produce a final version with the help of these comments.

Guidelines for the Single Documents

• only one page for each presentation
• name of the presenter
• title and abstract
• literature
• no graphics
• correction deadline: at least one week before the presentation date
• final deadline: presentation date

Slides

The presenter should consider the following hints:

• one title slide with name of the presenter, topic, course information, data, name and title of the supervisor, etc.
• about 18-20 slides (rule of thumb: most people need 2-4 minutes for each slide)
• landscape format
• no complete sentences, but rather buzzwords or bullet lists
• no serifes (e.g., Arial or Helvetica; Not: Times, ...)
• max. 8-10 lines for each slide
• correction deadline: at least one week before the presentation date
• final deadline: presentation date

Written Report

• about 20 pages
• preparing with Word or LaTeX (preferred), 10-12 pt font size
• title page: topic, name, date, seminar title, supervisor, Växjö University, Computer Science Department at MSI
• each page contains:
  • heading line with: topic on the left, date on the right
  • footer with: name on the left and page number on the right
• References at the end
• correction deadline: at least one week before the presentation date
• final deadline: two weeks after presentation date

Some Information about the Talk

The presentation time should be about 45 minutes for each presentation. The talk itself shall be carried out with notebook (using PowerPoint) and projector. Additional use of an overhead projector is also possible. Each talk is accompanied by a discussion of about 15 minutes. The presenter should have made all preparations 20 minutes before the presentation date approximately, i.e., the projector should be ready and tested together with the used notebook. There is a compulsory attendance for all course participants.

We need the following documents for each presentation:

• For each student: Each participant gets a copy of the one-page abstract before the talk.
• For the supervisor: The supervisor gets a copy of the one-page abstract AND an overview about the slides (4-6 slides on one A4 page) before the talk.
• After the talk: All documents must be submitted to the supervisor via email, i.e., the abstract, the overview, and the (eventually corrected) presentation. The final version of the written report should be sumbitted to the supervisor two weeks after the talk at the latest. PDF (including sources) is preferred.

A colleague at the Vienna University of Technoloy thought about a good presentation style (unfortunately only in German).