Last Updated on 27 April 2011

FYP Oral Presentation

It's Showtime!

After your FYP is finished, you get to tell others about it. The presentations are open to all students and their family members and friends.

The FYP presentation schedule for April 30th can be found here. A timetable view for all presentations can be found here. The FYT presentation schedule can be found here.

For your FYP oral presentation, your group has 40 minutes to explain your FYP, give a brief demonstration (live or with a video) and answer questions from your advisor and the second reader.  The Q&A time usually lasts about 10-20 minutes.  In most cases, the schedule for presentations will be tight, so you basically have 20-30 minutes to say what you want to say and show what you want to show.  Thus, you must plan your time well, or else you may not be able to present important parts at the end.

Learn From Previous FYP Presentations

You can learn from previous FYP presentations in two ways:

Help From Your CT

After you finish your final report, you have a short period of time to contact your CT to set an appointment for help with your presentation. You can ask questions and/or do a practice run, and your CT will try to provide presentation skills counsel and feedback.  He/she can also look at your PowerPoint slides and advise you on the language and content.  If you like, he/she can also use video recorder to video your practice presentation, so you can see how you look and sound.  Your CT can also review the video with you and give you constructive feedback.
 

Notes / Tips / Suggestions

  1. Every group member must speak, and his/her performance will affect both his/her personal grade and the group's grade.
  2. In April, check the FYP presentation schedule or the FYT presentation schedule
  3. Practice several times beforehand, making sure every group member speaks loudly, clearly and confidently.
  4. If you take too much time to give your presentation, your advisor may simply ask you to stop before you get to the end.
  5. Encourage your audience to ask you questions at any time; pause every few minutes and ask, "Any questions?"
  6. At the very beginning, make sure your audience clearly understands the goal of your project; if they have to ask, then you have not communicated well.
  7. If you did something difficult, be sure to mention it.
  8. If you did something creative, be sure to illustrate it.
  9. If you have 100 things you could say, pick the most important and/or interesting 10 or 20 and organize them logically.
  10. Demonstrate important functions with a live demo or a pre-recorded demo video, whichever is more practical for your time and space limitations.
  11. If you record a demo video, make it realistic and interesting and use some humor, if appropriate; if practical, upload it to YouTube.
  12. If you need to use the PC in the room you will use for your presentation, be sure to test your software and/or demo on it beforehand.  It's very embarrassing if you have to say, "But it worked on another PC!  Really!"
  13. If you need to connect your notebook PC to the overhead projector, bring your own video cable.
  14. If it is practical, run your PowerPoint, software and/or demo from a web server, so they will most likely work on any PC with Internet access.
  15. Avoid boring your audience.  If you're bored giving the presentation, the audience will be bored watching it.
  16. Look professional. (Guys - comb your hair, wear your tie correctly, tuck in your shirt, button your shirt collar buttons.)
  17. Presentations are open to anyone to watch, so don't be surprised if your audience has 10 or more people.
  18. Invite your parents!  This may be the climax your education at HKUST, and they are probably very proud of you.
  19. You should be prepared to answer around 5-10 questions from your advisor and the second reader, so decide in advance who will answer which questions.
  20. Some FYP advisors have special expectations for the FYP presentation. You can ask yours directly, or you can see what he/she said on a survey about FYP report preferences.
  21. Consider the questions asked during previous FYP presentations (see below) and see if you could answer questions relevant to your project.
  22. Watch some helpful videos on giving presentations (see below.)
  23. Read the following humorous yet instructive article by Edward Tufte: PowerPoint Is Evil
     

Previous General Questions (Relevant to Most Types of Projects)

  1. What is the primary goal of your project?
  2. Why did you choose this topic?
  3. What motivated you to do this project [or this part of the project]?
  4. What is the purpose of your system?
  5. What group of people would benefit from using your system?
  6. How does your software help the user?
  7. How many users can your system accommodate at one time?
  8. Does this system really work? What is the success or accuracy rate?
  9. How is your system different from [some similar real system]?
  10. Which part of your project took the most time? (each person be prepared to answer)
  11. What was the most difficult part of your project? (each person be prepared to answer)
  12. Which person in your group was responsible for each part of your system?
  13. Did you need to do a lot of programming?
  14. What software tools did you learn through the project?
  15. How do you know if you implemented the method [or algorithm] correctly?
  16. Can you please explain that diagram?
  17. Why did you have a problem with [some problematic part]?
  18. Is there any way to get around that problem?
  19. What kind of information can you display?
  20. Why did you choose this method (or these methods)?
  21. How did you test the system?
  22. How many times did you test the system?
  23. How do you confirm that the output is accurate?
  24. How could you have done better testing?
  25. What can you do to reduce error?
  26. How could you make the system more user-friendly?
  27. How could you speed up the algorithm?
  28. Can you demonstrate your system with another set of data?
  29. How realistic are these models?
  30. When you combined the two methods, how do you weight the contribution of the two, i.e., which one was more important?
  31. If you did it another way, what results would you expect?
  32. When did you add the administrative part?
  33. If you had an unlimited budget, what interesting conditions would be possible, i.e., what features or techniques would you add?
     

Previous Questions About Networking and Localization

  1. Why did you use the classic method?
  2. What were the difficulties you faced in the porting process?
  3. Where did you get your RSSI distance equation?
  4. Was the RSSI at one meter a single measurement or an average of several measurements?
  5. What did you do when the signal was not stable?
  6. What distance did you use in a big room?
  7. How dense did the reference nodes need to be?
  8. Have you tested the network settings with furniture in the room?
  9. How did you train the system with some sample data?
  10. How did you know the routing information?
  11. Did you use different devices to collect signal strength data? If so, what was the difference in performance?
  12. Since it was very tedious work to collect signal strength data, would it have helped to program the robot to do some of the work?
  13. Is there any problem if the the robot calibration changes from day to day?
  14. Are there any cases where one method does better than another?
  15. Why did it work better indoors than outdoors?
  16. If you block the light, will the system be affected?
  17. Do you always keep a recursive average of the last eight?
  18. Why did you choose a light sensor and an accelerometer?
  19. If you did this demo in dim light, would it affect the performance?
  20. If the room had a window, would it make a difference?
  21. Did you ever think about using multiple sensors to receive signals?
  22. If you were to use multiple sensors to receive signals, how would you deal with collisions?
  23. Are you limited to using a fixed route scenario?
  24. Is the 6 second delay setting an ad hoc value (i.e., designed just for this problem), or is there another reason for it?
  25. Have you thought about privacy issues?
  26. How can you make sure non of the owner's private information is disclosed?
  27. Can you make sure that only the owner can see the video?
  28. How do you address user privacy with the accelerometer and the light sensors?
     

Previous Questions About RFID Sensing

  1. What if the size of the scanned objects changes?
  2. What did you think of the Friis equation?
  3. Can you explain why the Friis equation was not accurate enough?
  4. Is there any chance that your co-efficient is not accurate enough?
  5. Upon what are your transmitted gain and received gain based on?
  6. Did you count measurement errors?
  7. Did the measurements errors significantly affect the calculations?
  8. Are you sure the angles on the simulated system are the same as the angles on the actual antenna?
  9. What happens when an RFID tag is detected by more than one antenna?
  10. Do the virtual tags determine granularity?
  11. In your experiment, Why did you use 3 tags at the same point?
  12. If there is interference, why do you use the tags concurrently?
  13. Why didn't you place the tags sparsely?
     

Previous Questions About Intelligent Location Based Services & Collective User Preferences

  1. Can you explain the normal flow from the user's point of view?
  2. Do you expect people to have to carry a notebook PC around to use your system?
  3. Will the system work on a PDA?
  4. Did you try GPS instead of Wi-Fi?
  5. Is there a DBMS on the server?
  6. How many grid cells did you use, and what size were they?
  7. What is the distance between objects or exhibits?
  8. If the grid cell size is larger, how does that affect the accuracy?
  9. What else affects accuracy?
  10. Is the localization affected by the door being open or closed?
  11. How did you transfer PLACELAB into Java?
  12. What was the level of accuracy you used to determine the best grid cell size?
  13. What do the X and Y axes represent?
  14. If new data keeps coming in, how can you you incorporate it?
  15. What differences would you expect if you used a book dataset instead of a movie dataset?
  16. Would the technical part change with a different type of dataset?
  17. How do you use GPS?
  18. Can you explain more about JSON?
  19. What's unique about JSON?
     

Previous Questions About Prediction-related Systems

  1. How do you rotate the terrain (in your simulation)?
  2. How was running time affected by the size of the cells?
  3. How accurate is your prediction?
  4. When you calculated your error, did you use historical data, i.e., did you simply predict things that already happened?
  5. What accuracy do you get when you predict future prices?
  6. Can you update the number of days for prediction in the future?
  7. What is the maximum number of days for future price prediction?
  8. Does the pattern flatten out after 100 days for all stocks?
  9. Would you use your own money to invest with this system?
  10. Which prediction method yielded the best results?
  11. Why did you not make past performance an indicator for future performance?
  12. How does a Naive Bayes (non-independent) classifier affect the output?
  13. Why does the prediction get worse when use data mining to analyze the news?
  14. How did you do the analysis of the news?
  15. What if the trends are contradictory?
  16. Is using the news to predict the price easy or hard?
  17. Did you read the 1998 UST PhD student's related work?
     

Previous Questions About Data Mining

  1. Why was your error rate so low when you used this algorithm?
  2. Why was one algorithm faster than another?
  3. How many items were in your sample data stream?
  4. Why did one algorithm use more memory than another?
  5. Can you show a graph for the memory usage to data size ratio?
  6. Why didn't you use any deterministic algorithms?
     

Previous Questions About Vision and Graphics

  1. Is there no correlation in this chart?
  2. When the wind is from the north, is there correlation with the index?
  3. How accurate is your system?
  4. Can you show sample data?
  5. Where did you get the data? Is it real data?
  6. When you draw tiles, do you do [some procedure] in advance?
  7. Why does it take up so much memory if you break it into tiles?
  8. Does the graph include the image?
  9. Did you consider parallel programming for the tile generator?
  10. Would it work if you get the source from all of them at the same time?
     

Previous Questions About Music and Pattern Matching

  1. Can you do it by either singing or humming?
  2. Can you hear the pattern of popular songs?
  3. Can you hear the pattern of unpopular songs?
  4. When you check for a pattern match, which part of songs do you check and how do you do it?
  5. If the range of one is 140, and the range of the other is 360, then how are they similar?
  6. How long is a song (time, number of notes)?
  7. Can you change it to 5 seconds instead of 10?
  8. Is your data precomputed and stored in a database?
  9. How do you determine K in the equation?
  10. How does the center change?
  11. Is the sampling rate for the voice?
  12. Why did you have such a high sampling rate?
  13. Voices don't go over a sampling rate of 1100, do they?
  14. What software did you use to convert the MIDI files?
  15. Do you convert the MIDI files to text format?
     

Previous Questions About Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  1. Why did you use an LED light and not a laser?
  2. Questions Related to Shortest Path Algorithms
  3. Did you make the images on the interface?
  4. How long does it take to precompute the shortest paths?
  5. When do you precompute the shortest paths?
     
  1. Did you train the system with some sample data?
  2. How does the system recognize images?
     

Previous Questions About Games

  1. Can I see your algorithm for the AI?
  2. How does the AI consider players' health points, magic points and distance when targeting them?
  3. Does a player who stays out of the way in a corner have a better chance of surviving?
  4. Does a player gain points by killing an AI entity?
  5. Did you use an existing game engine or write your game from scratch?
  6. How many lines of code did you use to write the prototype?
  7. How heavy was the workload?
  8. How many lines of code did you write altogether?
     

Previous Questions About Corporate Software

  1. Can you cite an example of the two companies' different requirements?
  2. Do you have two versions of your system?
  3. What does it mean to improve the system's circulation and richness?
  4. If a user fails to enter the correct password three times, is it possible to break into the system?
  5. Why is it necessary to reset the password?
  6. Is the system live now?
  7. Was it necessary to modify either database for the sake of compatibility?
  8. How did you do the database translation?
  9. Did you have to translate the database often?
  10. Did you do the conversion manually?
  11. It seems easy to delete some companies. Will that cause a problem?
  12. How will deleting a company affect reports?
  13. Technically, what happens when you delete a company?
  14. Do you allow cascade deletions?
     

Helpful Videos for Giving FYP Presentations

Previous HKUST CSE FYP Presentations

PowerPoint Secrets of Great Presentations (3 min.)

Boring People To Death With Your PowerPoint? (4 min.)

Tips for Public Speaking (2 min.)