AAAI05: my presentation

So my presentation of “Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community” (pdf) went well enough. It was hard to condense in 16 minutes all the background knowledge (epinions.com, trust networks and (local vs global) trust metrics, controversial users) and the experiments I did and the results. I tried but I probably left too much content, this meant I had to run a bit and my English does not allow me to run too fast, I guess I made a lot of English mistakes and I wasn’t too clear. I also had another problem: in the early tests, I was not able to connect my GNU/Linux machine to the projector so I had to use the laptop of another speaker, but he didn’t have OpenOffice installed (can you imagine that?) and so I run my presentation with Acrobat Reader but all the animations were gone. Well, I guess that it is still a little price you have to pay for choosing freedom (free software as GNU/Linux and OpenOffice).
Anyway, after the presentation, I got some positive feedbacks and some proposals for collaboration so it wasn’t too bad.
And lastly, I enjoyed the example about controversial user I gave in the presentation. As you can see in the picture it was George W. Bush. I thought my American audience would have appreciated it and so it was ;-) Actually I didn’t introduce the slide with too much of a funny story or suspence but it got anyway some laughs. Would you suggest me a good/funny way of introducing this slide, for next presentation? Of course I could have used Berlusconi instead of Bush but I guess I preferred a more aggressive example. Next time, I’ll try to joke a little also about myself being a “no global” (not that I like this tag or tags in general) since I critizise global trust metrics and propose Local Trust Metric but this kind of subtle pun requires a great preparation for being effective, funny and understood and I didn’t have it. Suggestions in making entertaining presentations are welcome.
As usual the slides are released under a Creative Commons licence: slides in OpenOffice format. Enjoy.
UPDATE: the presentation is now also on Slideshare.

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