Mailund on the Internet

The coming Friday we have our annual Computer Science Day at Aarhus University.  This is essentially the same as the Biology Day a few weeks back where I also gave a talk, but now at the Dept. of Computer Science, of course.

The point of these days is to present our groups and our work to the other groups in the department (and to students and anyone interested in general).  So it is a short presentation of the group followed by a presentation of one or two of our recent projects.

Working in Bioinformatics, I guess both biology and computer science considers it part of their research, although really BiRC is a separate research center.  Just with people from both backgrounds (and others).

I am going to talk about the usual association mapping stuff I always talk about these days.

I've put a lot of pictures in my slides, so it is a large download, but you can get it as PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote if you want to download the presentation. A Falsh version is here:

At least this is the last talk in a while, so now I can finally get some actual work done again...

Wednesday this week I'm giving a talk at the Danish Society for Computer Science. I was asked to give the keynote talk at this years general assembly before they hand out this year's Best Thesis Award.

I'm tired of talking about my main project -- association mapping -- so I decided to give a talk on our CoalHMM work (although I am only working on that a small percentage of my time).

The slides file is too big to upload to slideshare, but if my flash hack works you should see them below:

You can also get it as a PDF file, a PowerPoint file or a Keynote file, if you want.

The last couple of presentations I've made I have been using the Keynote program on my Mac. I'm really happy with the program. It makes it very easy to put together pretty presentations (if I say so myself) with very little work. Especially its handling of graphics impresses me. Compared to using OpenOffice, as I usually did before getting the Mac, there's essentially no work involved in including graphics. Automatic masking and alpha channels beats modifying images in Gimp any day!

I couldn't really figure out how to put presentations on my homepage, though. Keynote files are really directories, so you cannot just copy them to the homepage directory. I found out, though, that if a Mac downloads a zip'ed Keynote file it will just open it in Keynote, so I guess that is the way to do that.

In a few minutes I'm off to give a talk at CLC Bio.

 

It is essentially the same talk as I gave at the Department of Biology a few weeks ago.  These days I feel like I am talking more about association mapping than I manage to work on it.

At least the talk I'm giving in Copenhagen next week is on a different topic...

I just saw this one on on scienceblogs.

It is a bit bold of me to put it up here after I've just recently put up two of my presentations here, but still...

I don't think I'm that bad at presenting, but I do tend to put too much on my slides -- and too much text -- when I am in a hurry with them. When I have plenty of time, I try to rely solely on figures, but as the deadline draws nearer, I get stressed and I use text instead of figures ('cause text is so much faster to put on the slides).

To the advice given in the video, I'd like to add one of my own: when you prepare a presentation, start by thinking about the story you want to tell. You need to have a story to tell, otherwise you won't be able to structure the talk, and you certainly wont give an interesting talk. Just listing results gets boring fast. If you have a story to tell, the presentation almost prepares itself. You don't have to prepare so much, because you can easily remember your story (but not as easily remember a lot of key points) and if you have the story in mind when you give the presentation you feel the flow of it and you are less likely to get nervous.

At least, that is how I feel it.

Tomorrow I'm giving a talk on the Faculty of Health about my association mapping work. The slides can be seen below:

The topic is essentially the same as what I am covering in my series on "association mapping through local genealogies", so you can get the details there, if you don't get it all from the slides without the accompanying talk. Well, you can read it when I get around to writing it, right now there is only the introduction, so you can think of the slides as a teaser.

These are the first slides I've made in Keynote (since I only recently got myself a Mac). It took a little getting used to, and of course I wasted a lot of time porting slides from OpenOffice (compared to just making the slides in OpenOffice), but all in all I am impressed with Keynote and like the result here.

Now let's see how it will be received tomorrow...