Due: November 30 (By 11:59pm)


The goal of this assignment is to have you evaluate other presentations for what is good and what needs improvement. By focusing on a thorough assessment, you will be able to provide constructive criticism to the other groups while improving your own presentation skills.


There are currently 13 presentations scheduled. Therefore, for the 12 presentations that are not your own, you should write a paragraph or two assessing the quality of the presentation and the quality of the research.

This assessment should have four parts. The first three are focused on the specific components of the research and the presentation.

  1. Motivation: the start of the presentation is critical for several reasons: (1) you need to explain all of the background and motivation, (2) you need to make the introduction exciting enough to keep the audience's interest, and (3) you need to slowly introduce the audience to your speaking style and cadence. You will want to assess the presentations both for content and style.

  2. Project Idea: is the project idea interesting, novel, and worthwhile? Clearly there has to be some intuition about whether the idea is a good one, but the presenters can also do a good job by positioning the problem and solution in the context of related work.

  3. Evaluation: is the evaluation rigorous, thorough, and convincing? While some of the evaluation for these projects will be given as future work, the presenters should still describe the overall evaluation plan and then describe specifically the pieces they have implemented, and what the evaluation demonstrates.
The fourth part are intangibles. These include mostly generic presentation style criteria: not loud enough, too slow/fast, the effectiveness of presentation aids, etc.

Additional Notes


The assignment should be submitted via email to almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu. The submission format can be any commonly used format. Keep in mind that this assignment is due only 13 hours after the last class. Plan accordingly!