A Generic Conference Talk Outline

This conference talk outline is a starting point, not a rigid template. Most good speakers average two minutes per slide (not counting title and outline slides), and thus use about a dozen slides for a twenty minute presentation.

Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)

Forecast (1 slide)
Give gist of problem attacked and insight found (What is the one idea you want people to leave with? This is the "abstract" of an oral presentation.)

Outline (1 slide)
Give talk structure. Some speakers prefer to put this at the bottom of their title slide. (Audiences like predictability.)

Background
Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides)
(Why should anyone care? Most researchers overestimate how much the audience knows about the problem they are attacking.)

Related Work (0-1 slides)
Cover superficially or omit; refer people to your paper.

Methods (1 slide)
Cover quickly in short talks; refer people to your paper.

Results (4-6 slides)
Present key results and key insights. This is main body of the talk. Its internal structure varies greatly as a function of the researcher's contribution. (Do not superficially cover all results; cover key result well. Do not just present numbers; interpret them to give insights. Do not put up large tables of numbers.)

Summary (1 slide)

Future Work (0-1 slides)
Optionally give problems this research opens up.

Backup Slides (0-3 slides)
Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total) to answer expected questions. (Likely question areas: ideas glossed over, shortcomings of methods or results, and future work.)