My Current Vote for the Best Abstract of the Year
Speaker: Jenny Rose Finkel
Occasion: Thursday’s NLP Lunch
Title: Practice Job Talk
Abstract by Adam Vogel:
Although much attention has been payed to supervised talks, where all audience members are paying attention, in practice this can be expensive if not impossible to achieve. This motivates semi-supervised talks, wherein the speaker is given relatively few attentive listeners, combined with a larger number of partially listening, mostly laptop using, audience members. Through novel usage of humor, animated slide transitions, and stimulants, I will demonstrate an iterative bootstrapping method, based on spectral graph theory, which yields attention levels rivaling those of talks where everyone listens the whole time.