Each case study presentation should consume half of a class meeting. You should prepare a 20-minute presentation, leaving a few minutes for questions and discussion. You and your partner can split this time however you want (including having one of you do all the talking). However, you should give one cohesive presentation, rather than two separately-prepared segments. The goal of having you work in teams is to get stronger presentations. You should design the presentation (content, structure, etc) as a team.
Guidelines:
These are technical presentations to a technical audience. Give details of algorithms, languages, technologies, or other information as relevant for your topic. High-level overviews suitable for the evening news will not earn you many points.
Use concrete examples. If you are presenting a tool or a language, we should see fragments of actual code or actual interactions with a tool. If you are presenting an attack, show how to construct an actual instance of it. If you are presenting on a proposed technology, provide concrete examples of how the proposal would work (and examples of how it wouldn't).
Cover both strengths and weaknesses of any approaches relevant to your topic. If you are presenting a tool or language, for example, don't just show what it can do. Try to identify useful tasks in the space of the tool/language that it doesn't support well. Think of this presentation as helping the rest of the security team at your workplace decide whether to adopt a similar approach.
Where appropriate, cover the four components of policy, mechanism, assurance, and incentive. Most topics relate to some of these more than others. Give time appropriate to each based on the nature of your topic. The goal is to get you to think beyond the purely technical aspects of your topic though, into the surrounding implications. For example, many topics have privacy implications or interact with legal issues. You should talk about these where relevant, just at a sufficient level of depth for a serious tutorial rather than a casual overview.
The medium is up to you. You may use Powerpoint, but you certainly don't need to. Live demos, whiteboard talks, creative interpretations (so long as they highlight technical content) are all fair game here.
Good presentations will not be thrown together the day or two before. You will need a bit of time to read up on your topic, distill the information, and assemble the presentation. I'm expecting you to put a good 10 hours into preparing this.
Grades will be based on the material you chose to present, the detail at which you presented it, and the clarity of the presentation itself.
I'm glad to consult with you outside of class as you prepare your presentation. Feel free to show me draft slides, outlines, etc (though keep in mind that I can't give you much useful feedback the night before you are due to present).
Your case-study critique should be a detailed technical analysis of the presentation given by another team. Your critique should be a typeset document, roughly 2-3 pages in length. Critiques are done individually, not in teams.
Guidelines:
Your critique should briefly (no more than a paragraph) summarize the content presented; the rest of the critique should comment on that content. Consider issues such as technical accuracy, whether it conveyed the important points, and whether it missed any major aspects within any of policy/mechanism/assurance/incentive. A paragraph on the quality of the presentation is acceptable, but not necessary. You are mainly responding to the technical content of the presentation.
Grades will be based on the accuracy and thoroughness of your assessment and the quality of your writeup as a piece of technical prose. Clear, concise writing counts. Statements like "the presentation was all off because it didn't talk about the problems with the area" aren't sufficient. Your prose should be more formal than "all off", more precise than "the problems", and tighter scoped than "the area". Imagine that this is a technical evaluation for your boss in a work setting.
I expect you will spend as much time reading about your critique area as you will about your presentation area. The difference lies in how you demonstrate what you have learned about the topic.
Here are starting links relevant to your topic. You don't have to present exactly the content of these papers, but I expect these to figure into your presentation to some extent unless you clear different references with me beforehand. (This is mainly to ensure that presentations are aiming for the appropriate technical depth). Some of the papers contain references to other useful information, so check those out in preparing your presentation.
To access links into ACM's Digital Library, you will need to be inside the WPI network (either directly or via VPN).
Presenters are finding their own resources