 Welcome to this presentation with simple advice on giving a scientific talk. Most scientists have to do many jobs and it is therefore not surprising that most others are bad at most of them and consequently most scientists are mediocre presenters at best. This is great news because it means it is easy for you to look good in comparison. Just remember that science should be fun. Giving a scientific presentation is about 50% communicating science and 50% entertaining the audience. I assume you know your science and that means that you can focus almost 100% on making it entertaining. In this video I'll start by talking about how to open a presentation, give some general advice on presentation technique, talk about some of the special challenges of giving long presentations and finally give you some advanced tricks. Let's start with the opening. I think we've all seen it done the wrong way where the first slide after the cover looks something like this. I'll start by giving you an outline on my presentation. First I'll give an introduction in which I give some background, then in the methods I'll explain the method and in results I'll present our results followed by a discussion where I'll discuss the results. Finally I'll give a summary where I'll summarize the talk. And there might be time for some questions at the end. This is a tragedy in one slide. The audience has already lost attention. You need to hook them fast. A lot of research has been done on this and many numbers have been thrown around. I'll say you have less than 10 seconds for convincing the audience that you're a good presenter and less than 30 seconds to convince them that this is an interesting topic they want to hear about. I like to start with why. I often give presentations about text mining and I ask why text mining. If you're not doing text mining you might ask why would you want to do that and if you are doing text mining you might ask why do you want to do that to yourself. The answer in both cases is because there's simply too much to read we have to do text mining. I also give a lot of presentation about network biology and I ask why networks. The simple answer is that networks are a powerful abstraction whenever you want to understand how many things interact with each other and it therefore lends itself naturally to visualizing biological systems. Let's move on with general presentation technique. You need to know your story so that you can focus completely on delivery of the story. You need to speak up, you need to be able to keep a steady pace and you need to get comfortable with silence. It's said that silence is golden. I don't know if I always agree but silence is definitely always better than um are you know fillers. Also you can use silence strategically to let key points sink in. I hope you all know that it's important to look at the audience but what many people forget is that it's also important to have the audience look at you and have the audience listen to you. For this reason you want to have very simple slides. Slides with minimal text and slides that require no pointing. Remember that the slides are for the audience. The slides are not for you they are not your notes. You cannot look at two places at the same time whenever you're looking at your slides you're not looking at the audience. The audience cannot look at two places at the same time. When they look at the slides for a long time they are not looking at you and most importantly the audience cannot read and listen at the same time. So if you have slides with a lot of text on them and the audience are reading the text they are not listening to you. Reading long presentations requires additional consideration. By long presentations I mean anything more than 20 minutes. This is inherently more challenging because it's hard to keep the audience hooked for such a long time. To be honest at least part of the audience will lose attention when you give a long talk. There are two ways of dealing with this disease. Treatment which is how can we bring back the debt. You need to have re-entry points. If you're giving a long presentation you need to have semi-independent parts that while they are related don't depend strongly on each other. And you need to make it clear when people can rejoin the presentation even if they fell asleep earlier. The other which is always better is prevention. How can you prevent people from falling asleep? For that you need to have an unexpected change that wakes them up roughly every 15 minutes. You can do that several ways. I like to use jokes with a purpose. For example when I talk about text mining at some point I'll talk about how to identify gene names in text and I'll bring up the point that the bad gene is a really bad gene. I like to sometimes use fake improvisation. I make the audience think that I'm diverging to tell a side story that wasn't even really planned and for that reason I have no slides about it. Not having slides for a short while is a very welcome change in a long slideshow. Organs engagement is also something you can play with. For example, asking the audience a question. Finally let's take some advanced tricks. When you're giving talks at conferences you will typically be part of a session where there are other speakers. You can look very professional if you're able to refer back or even refer forward to the other speakers in your session thereby being the person who ties the whole session together as a whole. You also want to be able to adapt to the audience by that I don't mean adapting the talk to who are in the audience that you should have done before showing up but being able to on the spot adapt to are they asleep? Did the speaker before you put the audience asleep? If so you need to wake them up and that means having a really high energy opening on your talk even more powerful than usual just to wake them up. Are they very active? In that case you might want to keep them active by allowing questions during the talk. This is challenging because you still need to stay on time even though you're now being interrupted all the time. Are you running a workshop? If so, you might want to consider having a lot of extra material so much material that you cannot possibly make it through even half of it in your workshop. This allows the audience to choose their own adventure. They can tell you which parts they want you to dive more into. I hope this gave you some good ideas for how to give better talks. If you want to learn more, I suggest you watch this presentation next. Thanks for your attention.