[Sem I 2025-26]

Overview

This seminar course provides an opportunity to students to exercise presentation skills involved in conveying technical ideas to a broader audience. The ability to understand crux of a technical idea/application is a valued skill in any profession. Technical communication plays a role particularly if you are working on collaborative projects and teams.

In this course, the student will go through the experience of understanding a contemporary technical work, distilling outs its core idea and what it enables. Finally, you will make a presentation in class explaining your insights to your peers.

Announcements

• The list of students who have presented is available here, along with their corresponding time slots.
• As there are no sign ups for September 3rd, no seminar will be held on September 3rd. Seminars will take place as scheduled subsequently.
• First session will be held on Wednesday, August 20th, 2pm in SIT001.
• Please select your papers and slots by Thursday 28.08.2025.

Venue

• The venue for all seminars will be Bharti Building Room 501 (Fourth Floor). The timing is 2:30pm till 4:00pm on Wednesdays (as per schedule).

Teaching Assistants

• Mr. Namasivayam K (CSE) and Mr. Rachit Thukral (SIT).

Preparing your Presentation

1. Identify the technical material for your presentation

• The list of papers appears at this link. The papers contain recent works that apply contemporary AI techniques to a particular application area or a domain.
• Papers have been taken from AI conferences or important papers that have emerged in recent years. The technical material should be accessible to a student who has taken basic dept. course including introductory AI/ML courses.
• Note that this course puts less emphasis on fully understanding the technical details and more on understanding the gist of the material and communicating its relevance/impact to a technical audience. Hence, it is ok to not understand all the details but simply to understand the work at a coarse level and understand the core idea.
• Research papers are often dense and hence reading a new paper is usually tedious. A few suggestions to ease the process of engaging with a paper:
  1. Start by reading the abstract/introduction and the conclusion sections. Understand what is the problem this work is trying to solve? What is the main point of the paper?
  2. Then skim over the technical material and try to get a high-level picture of the the technology components involved. Understand, the key components involved in arriving at the solution.
  3. Next, engage a bit more with the technical details and examine the mathematical/computing details. Again, note that we are not intending to understand everything in the paper but rather get some experience in reading something new and understanding its main message.
  4. Next, read the experiments/results section. Identify the main result: what does this work make possible which was not possible before? Usually, this is one main figure, the main table or a video demonstrating something that was made possible by this work but was not possible earlier.
• Finally, reading and understanding a paper in one go is usually hard. It is recommended to read in phases and allow time to reflect on its main message and its impact. Also, you are welcome to discuss with your partner and verify your understanding of the work.