presenting-conference-talks

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• SKILL.md
• slide-templates.md · references/

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Presenting Conference Talks: From Paper to Slides

Generate conference presentation slides from a compiled research paper. Produces both **Beamer LaTeX PDF** (for polished typesetting) and **editable PPTX** (for last-minute adjustments), with speaker notes and an optional talk script.

## When to Use This Skill

| Scenario | Use This Skill | Use Other Skills Instead |
|----------|---------------|--------------------------|
| Preparing oral/spotlight/poster-talk slides | ✅ | |
| Generating Beamer PDF + PPTX from paper | ✅ | |
| Speaker notes and talk script | ✅ | |
| Writing the paper itself | | ml-paper-writing |
| Structuring a systems paper | | systems-paper-writing |
| Creating publication-quality plots | | academic-plotting |

**Attribution**: This skill's structure draws inspiration from the ARIS paper-slides skill (570 lines, supporting poster/spotlight/oral/invited with Beamer+PPTX). This is an independent implementation for the AI-Research-SKILLs ecosystem.

---

## Talk Types and Slide Counts

| Talk Type | Duration | Slides | Content Depth |
|-----------|----------|--------|---------------|
| poster-talk | 3–5 min | 5–8 | Problem + key result only |
| spotlight | 5–8 min | 8–12 | Problem + approach + key results |
| oral | 15–20 min | 15–22 | Full story with evaluation highlights |
| invited | 30–45 min | 25–40 | Deep dive with context and demos |

**Rule of thumb**: ~1 slide per minute for oral, ~1.5 slides per minute for spotlight.

---

## Slide Structure Templates

### Poster-Talk (5–8 slides)

```text
Slide 1: Title + Authors + Affiliation
Slide 2: Problem — Why this matters (1 motivating figure)
Slide 3: Key Insight — One-sentence thesis
Slide 4: Approach Overview — Architecture diagram
Slide 5: Main Result — Headline numbers (1 figure)
Slide 6: Takeaway + QR code to paper/code
```

### Spotlight (8–12 slides)

```text
Slide 1:  Title + Authors
Slide 2:  Problem Statement — Concrete, quantified
Slide 3:  Motivation — Why existing solutions fall short
Slide 4:  Key Insight — Thesis statement
Slide 5:  System Overview — Architecture diagram
Slide 6:  Design Highlight 1 — Core mechanism
Slide 7:  Design Highlight 2 — Key innovation
Slide 8:  Evaluation Setup — Baselines and workloads (brief)
Slide 9:  Main Results — Headline performance figure
Slide 10: Ablation / Breakdown — What contributes most
Slide 11: Summary + Contributions
Slide 12: Thank You + Links
```

### Oral (15–22 slides)

```text
Slide 1:  Title + Authors + Venue
Slide 2:  Outline (optional — "roadmap" slide)
Slide 3:  Problem Context — Domain importance
Slide 4:  Problem Statement — Specific challenge
Slide 5:  Motivation — Gaps in existing systems
Slide 6:  Key Insight — Thesis
Slide 7:  System Overview — Architecture diagram
Slide 8:  Design Component 1 — Detailed walkthrough
Slide 9:  Design Component 2 — Detailed walkthrough
Slide 10: Design Component 3 — Detailed walkthrough
Slide 11: Design Alternatives — Why not other approaches
Slide 12: Implementation — Key engineering highlights
Slide 13: Evaluation Setup — Testbed, baselines, metrics
Slide 14: End-to-End Results — Main performance
Slide 15: Result Deep Dive — Breakdown or per-workload
Slide 16: Ablation Study — Component contributions
Slide 17: Scalability — Scaling behavior
Slide 18: Demo Slide (systems talks) — Screenshot or recording
Slide 19: Related Work — Positioning (brief)
Slide 20: Summary — Contributions restated
Slide 21: Future Work — Open questions
Slide 22: Thank You + Paper Link + QR Code
```

### Invited Talk (25–40 slides)
Extends the oral structure with:
- Additional context slides (field overview, historical progression)
- Multiple demo/walkthrough slides
- Deeper evaluation analysis
- Broader implications and future directions
- Q&A preparation slides (hidden, for backup)

---

## Systems Talk Specifics

Systems conference talks have unique requirements compared to ML talks:

### Demo Slide
- Include a **live demo** or **pre-recorded screencast** of the system in action
- Always have a **recorded backup** — live demos fail at the worst times
- Show the system under realistic load, not toy examples

### Architecture Walkthrough
- Animate the architecture diagram: highlight components as you explain them
- Use Beamer `\only<N>` or `\onslide<N>` for progressive reveal
- Walk through a **concrete request** end-to-end through the system

### Evaluation Highlights
- Select 2–3 strongest figures from the paper
- Annotate figures on slides (arrows, circles highlighting key points)
- State the takeaway **before** showing the figure ("Our system is 2x faster — here's the data")

---

From Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs, MIT.

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