Presentations
AI-Assisted Programming for PhD Researchers
The course is accredited through your final presentation. This page covers the format, what it must contain, how it is graded, and the practicalities for the room.
Format
Each presentation is 10–15 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A with me and your peers. Presentations run Day 3 from 13:15, back to back, with a short break in the middle of the block. Presentation order is drawn at 12:15, right after Project Development II ends. Use the time between the draw and 13:15 for last-minute preparation, not for new work on your project.
Required Content
Your presentation must include four things, the same four points you have seen referenced all week:
Project demonstration. Show your working solution: the output it produces, the command or steps that produce it, and how it maps to the acceptance criteria in your spec. A demo that fails live is fine if you have a fallback recording ready (see Practicalities).
Process reflection. Walk through how you used AI tools across planning and development: where you wrote the spec, where the agent planned, where it implemented, where you verified. This is also where your AI-use disclosure belongs: which tool(s) you used, roughly how much of the code the agent wrote versus you, and where you diverged from its output.
Challenges and limitations. What went wrong, where the agent got something wrong or you had to intervene, and how you handled it. Honest difficulty is worth more here than a polished story with no friction in it.
Insights and recommendations. Practical advice for other PhD students working with AI coding assistants that a peer in a different field could take away and use in their own work.
Rubric
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Demo works and is understood | 40% |
| Process reflection depth | 25% |
| Challenges: honesty and analysis | 20% |
| Insights transferable to peers | 15% |
Practicalities
- The room provides HDMI and USB-C. Bring the right adapter for your laptop if you need one.
- Test your setup at lunch (12:15–13:15): connect, share your screen, and confirm your demo runs on the room’s display before your slot.
- Have a fallback recording of your demo ready (see the Capstone page’s Day 3 timebox) in case anything breaks live.
- The room stays open 12:15–13:15 specifically for this testing. Use it.