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INST 734
Information Retrieval Systems
Fall 2015
Project Video Report (Assignment P14)

Video presentation

Because we want your video to be watched by your classmates, your video should be no more than 10 minutes long -- this is a sharp limit. And because you will likely have a lot to say, it shouldn't be much shorter than that. Your experience with making the choices needed to write a good one-page summary should be helpful in this regard.

For an instructor-designed project, you can choose to talk about either your user study or your batch evaluation; do not try to split your focus to talk about both. For student-designed projects, you should endeavor to at least briefly mention every aspect of what you did, but you should give greater focus to aspects of the project that involve evaluation results and novel design innovations.

Here's a useful outline for a project presentation video:

• Describe the questions that you sought to answer. The best reports are not detective stories in which the point of the exercise only becomes clear at the end -- even if that's how your project unfolded! Rather, a good report is a told story, in which the usual tell-'em-what-you're-going-to-tell-'em strategy is the right way to start.
• Describe the systems or systems that you are evaluating Don't get too carried away here -- all you need is enough for people to understand how the questions you wanted to answer are related to what the system(s) you used actually does. Maybe it will be helpful to show a screen shot or two if you are talking about an interactive system.
• Describe the design of your study.
• Summarize what you learned, and present results that support those claims. Note that you will likely have many more results than you could possibly present in the time you have, so the key is to be selective and weave a coherent story.
• Describe the limitations of your study that affect the interpretations of your conclusions. Surely you will have many limitations, but again the best approach is to focus on those that affect what you were able to learn. For example, if you had too few participants in a user study for you to be able to generalize your results to a larger population, that would be worth saying.
• Say a few words about what you learned by doing the project. This need not be limited to things related to the part of your project that you chose to focus on in the rest of your video presentation.
• End with any thoughts you might have about future work that others might perform based on what you have learned.

You can create your video report using any software that you wish, but the final version should be submitted either as an .mp4 video file (if you wish that it be shared only with your classmates) or as a YouTube URL. I've made my videos for the class in three ways. The simplest way is to make a "selfie" video in which you hold your phone and speak to it. This is particularly useful for "on location" shots, although as you have seen in my videos the tradeoff is somewhat lower production quality. A small variant on this is to get someone else to hold the camera, which gives you more control over the perspective and framing -- you can even replace a person with a bookshelf to get less shaky video. A more complex approach is to use some desktop video software. I use Panopto Recorder for this, which is available (to you as well) through ELMS, but there's no end to the desktop systems that you might try. The downside is that most (including Panopto) are more complex then shooting video with a mobile phone would be, for the simple reason that they have more capabilities, which take some time to learn.

Regardless of how you capture your video, you will probably want to do at least a little editing. Panopto has a built in editor. For videos I shoot on my mobile phone, I transfer them to a PC and then I use Movie Maker, which is a part of Microsoft Essentials (and thus is free). There are many video editing packages available, but this is the simplest one I have found to get started with, and it does most of what you need (trimming and splicing).

You can select a single presenter for your project, or you can share the presentation in whatever way you wish across your team members.

You can submit your presentation video using ELMS. The video presentation (but not your written reports) will be shared with other students in the course. You may, if you wish, instead submit a public URL for your video presentation; if you do, that will be linked from the course Web page (for public display).

As with all project components, your video presentation will contribute to your overall project grade, which will be holistic (not some formulaic combination of grades for separate parts).