Weekly Meetings RFC

Goal

We have weekly meetings, held in the conference room of Flex Module 1 (Room B122). For Fall 2004, the meetings start at 4:30pm Tuesday afternoons.

The goal of this meeting is to:

• Enable you adviser to track your progress.
• Enable the students to track their progress.
• Familiarize the other group members with the research area of each other.
• Encourage the group members to contribute with their ideas to each other's projects.
• Allow the students to practice making effective presentation.
• Improve the students' communication skills.

Presentation

Each student will email his/her adviser and the other team members a presentation (PowerPoint of pdf) at least twenty four hours in advance of the meeting time. Make sure you keep the materials you used for these presentations for inclusion in future presentations (papers at conferences, qualifying/preliminary exams, thesis defenses, etc.)

Your report should contain the following:

1. Current progress on project: tasks completed, tasks under way.
2. Technical content of tasks completed or under way. By presenting this work, the rest of the team stays up to date with the latest results.
3. Tasks to complete before next meeting.
4. Issues that (may) obstruct current or upcoming tasks: anticipated problems, software or hardware needed, etc. Be sure to include sufficient background information so that other team members can offer practical solutions. The report must be submitted well before the meeting to allow the other members to find solutions.
5. Metrics on completed tasks: actual hours needed to perform task (with breakdown), areas which deviate from estimates, causes of deviation. This enables the students to improve estimates for future tasks to make them more accurate.
6. Do not spend an inordinate amount of time in polishing your presentation beyond what is strictly needed for understanding the problem at hand.

Procedures

About ten to fifteen minutes before the meeting one of the group members (in the order they are listed on the group members' page) will come to your adviser's office to pick up the key for the Flex mail room (room 1411), will go in the mail room, pick up the projector and set it up in the conference room. We will start the meeting promptly at the scheduled time.

Each student will take turns making the presentation (your adviser will supply the laptop used for the presentation). Try really hard to keep the presentation shorter than 30 minutes (with 10-15 min being ideal). If the presentation is longer than 30 minutes you probably included too much details and the discussion is better suited for an one-on-one meeting with your adviser. It is OK, however, for the presentation to be longer than 30 minutes due to questions and discussions. Sparking discussions is one of the main goals of this meeting.

Feedback

To increase the effectiveness of the meetings I (and the other team members) may score a presentation in the following categories:

1. Conciseness - get to the point as quickly as possible, but no quicker. Use diagrams when useful.
2. Background - provide enough context for everyone in the meeting to understand the issues.
3. Delivery - speak clearly, let us know you care about the material and are proud of your presentation.
4. Appearance - make the report look good. Structure the report well, use white space appropriately, use color to simplify the interpretation of data or diagrams. Do not overdo it! (Jangeun, I'm talking to you! :-)
5. Relevance - leave out things which don't matter.