Presentations

During the quarter each student will be asked to give a presentation in one of the informatics sessions that generally occur on the Wednesday of each week. The total length of the presentation should aim for about 15 minutes.

Each student presentation should be in the form of a journal club reporting on the assigned informatics readings associated with a biological topic presented in the Monday session. The assigned reading to be presented will generally describe current informatics research related to the topic. As a rule the student should talk about all the required readings, but in some cases not all the readings will need to be discussed, as, for example, when one of the readings is very long. Whenever the student wishes to talk about fewer than all the assigned readings he or she should consult with the instructor.

In general, for each article the presentation should give an overview of the problem(s) the article is addressing and how this problem relates to the Monday topic if at all, how the methods described in the article address this problem, the methods and results, and what still needs to be done. Since these topics generally reflect the organization of most articles, a reasonable presentation format is to follow the organization of the paper. If there is more than one article (the usual case) the student should discuss how the articles relate to each other in the context of the broader area that the combined articles are dealing with. Such discussion will require the stident to try to synthesize a larger picture from the individual components.The presentation should end with questions and topics for discussion by the class as a whole.

The presentation should not be less than 15 minutes, and the bulk of that time should be spent describing the content of the paper(s). The discussion questions at the end should take on the order of a minute to describe. These are meant to stimulate discussion after the presentation is over, not during the presentation.

Following the student presentation (and possibly after some discussion) the instructor will open up the session to other students and guests, for discussion about the questions and issues raised in the presentation, and the questions to which students will have submitted written answers prior to class.

Following the overview on the first day of class students should list their top three choices for presentation topics. This list should be emailed to the instructor by the Monday class of the second week. I will then assign you to a specific topic based on your choices and the available class sessions.

Grading for this assignment will take into account:

Specifics: How well the student describes the content of the paper(s), in enough depth for a person who has not read the papers to get a good idea of what is in them.
The big picture: How well the student ties the papers together (if there was more than one), and how well the student relates the papers to the biological topic.
Delivery: The presentation style and delivery

In general Specifics will have the highest weight, but the exact percentages allocated for each of the categories will somewhat vary depending on the particular set of papers.