Are You Talking to Me?

See http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1972563

Wow, totally agree.
Btw: you bring up a good point here for further research. It is my firm belief that there will be an almost perfect inverse correlation between the number of people in the audience reading their email and the rating of the speaker by evaluation forms. Once we have established this we can get rid of these eval forms and just count the ratio of open laptops.

Oh! Was there a face-to-face programme committee meeting before ?

50% of the people understood 50% of 50%. But maybe 60% understood 70% of 30% of the talks, which is not that bad.

The laptop issue is real problem, but if we can't be honest then we can't fix the problem. Presentation skills need to be a consideration. There is one computer scientist that I really admire and try to follow his work, but his presnentations often consist of showing the PDF of the paper being presented. Everyone tunes out after 5 minutes.

Many talks by PhD students are just horrible. Especially the Asian students that lack sufficient English skills to give a talk. I've attended lots of these that are nothing but painful to sit through. No one ever says anything to the student or advisor. If they do the response is often indignation and some response about the critic not being sufficiently "multicultural".

Personally I would rather accept a paper and have the presentation an option. Someone with a history of really bad presentations can be told they don't get to present unless they demonstrate improvement similarly professors are told if they send a student that isn't prepared to present then only the paper will be accepted. An alternate solution would be to only publish papers if the presentation is sufficiently good.

I mostly agree with these remarks. In particular, I have attended many recent conference talks in large lecture halls (300-500 persons) where the speaker is using 10 point fonts! I have complained to little avail. Also, speakers need to speak into the microphones (usually that means facing the audience not the screen).

I have to admit that I attended some bad talks given by native speakers, but English as a second language is more often a barrier to brilliant lectures. If --and I agree-- science is a social undertaking, the linguistic domination of English is a real problem, especially on the spoken side, with its /analgorithmic/ phonetics especially hard for Asian and Latin people. Rem tene, verba sequentur? Maybe when one can think before writing, not in the interactive setting of a talk, often with half-understood questions.

Moshe points out that a lot of the important stuff happens outside of the presentation. Is the problem not so much a problem with bad presentations but rather a problem with the structure of conferences? Presentations can be made available either in written form or on Utube before and attendees can look at them in their own time. Why waste valuable discussion time? It would be much more valuable to all those interested in the paper and in particular the author if instead of a talk, one had a facilitated discussion on the paper and how it relates to what others are doing? Authors could also be given the opportunity to improve on their papers taking into account comments maked in the discussion. Another idea would be to have mechanisms to arrange meetings for attendees even if they are not giving papers.

Another (partial) fix is to raise the profile of poster presentations. Some of the problems with talks are fixed with a good poster presentation (language skills are not so crucial, font sizes less critical, questions can be asked interactively to clarify areas of confusion, ...). However, posters are too often viewed as a second rate acceptance. Conferences like AAAI and IJCAI are fighting this by giving the best papers both a talk and a poster. Other conferences like UAI had the foresight to fix this from the start.

I think the simplest solution is to:
1. Enforce that 80% of the talk is about the why is the topic important and what led to this conclusion.
2. Limit the number of words per slides.
3. Maximize the number of interactive diagrams.
Lot of experience is needed to give a good talk about the optimality of ABC under bla bla conditions. But far less experience is needed if a story is told that what led the author to optimality of ... and why is it useful.