How to Speak by Prof. Patrick Winston

I have watched the full talk, 1 hour and three minutes. At the end of the talk, I'd like to solute to Prof. Winston. This is a MUST watch! It will make one a better writer, a much better speaker to persuade people, and help improve the skill of job hunting or getting recognized of one's ideas. 

There are many memorable notes. Here are a few things: 

1. How to start a talk? Give promises. Tell your audience or students what they can learn. For research talks, show problems by an example. For the case of resource allocation problem, the professor shows how to color a US map with neighboring states in different color. Normal algorithms may never end. On the other hand, a good optimization problem runs in a few seconds. This shows a stark contrast and demonstrates great benefits of an algorithm.  

2. How to give a successful job talk as faculty candidate? In the first 5 minutes, one needs to give a vision and demonstrate that he/she has worked on the research. The second part requires one to show steps of how to solve the problem even he/she has not worked out all the steps.

3. How to design slides? Be concise; use big fonts. 

4. How to get recognized for one's idea? Five elements: have symbols, have a slogan, give surprise, have a salient idea, and tell stories of the discovery. 

5. How to end slides? Use Conclusion page to show your unique contributions. 

6. How to end a talk? Do not say thank you. Rather salute the audience with somethings different. "It's been fun to be at MIT. I look forward to coming back again". Prof. Winston demonstrated two politicians good at speech on how they ended a talk: Governor Christie and Bill Clinton. In both cases, the speakers salute to the audience. They were fun to watch.