Present and Read Papers

昨天去聽了李家同教授的演講，題目是"How to Perform a Good Presentation of a Paper and How to Read Difficult Papers"，雖然大部分 MK 都強調過好多次，不過我還是將演講的重點簡單摘要一下：

How to Perform a Good Presentation?

1. Always remember that no term can be mentioned without first defining it.

2. The definition of any term must be precise (嚴謹,精準). And the definition has to be accurate (正確).

3. Once a term is defined, this definition must be strictly followed.

4. Every statement must be precise.

5. Once a term is defined and mentioned, it must be mentioned later. If it is not used later, why should we have defined it in the first place?

6. The presentation must be smooth. Suppose you are now talking about subject A. Then you start talking about subject B while these two subjects are totally unrelated. This is not good. Something must be wrong. There are two possibilities. The first possibility is that something between A and B should be talked about. But you missed it. The second possibility is that B should not be presented after A at all. A good presentation is just opposite to a good detective story. (A good detective story always keeps the reader puzzled.)

7. Tell the whole story from the very beginning. In other words, give the top view of the paper first and give the technical details later. The worst case is to introduce individual trees before introducing the structure of the forest.

How to Read Difficult Papers?

1. Given a paper to read, we should always try to get the top view before getting into the technical details. If you fail to see the whole forest, knowing individual trees would never help you.

2. If this paper is an improvement of some old techniques and you do not know these old techniques. Give up this paper at once and go to read the old papers.

3. Never miss any critical point.

4. Never pay too much attention to abstract definitions. You must understand the physical meaning of these definitions. You must try to figure out why the researcher defined these terms. The worst case is that you learn advanced topics by rote learning. That is, you simply remember some terms without knowing what they really mean.