Is Anyone Listening to You?

[Eugene Freuder]

Do you want to know if attendees at your conference talks are following your presentations, or whether you are wasting your time and theirs?

I have long conjectured a “50/50/50 law” that states: 

At any paper presentation session at least half the attendees will be effectively “lost” at least half way through at least half of the presentations. 

And I think that is conservative. :-) Authors talk very fast, to reproduce as much of their paper as they can, rather than letting the talk be an advertisement for the paper. They fill the screen with tiny type and a surfeit of data. They introduce terminology and notation that ignores the “7 plus or minus 2” size of our short term memory. They rush through complex equations and assume familiarity with underlying mathematical and computational methods. 

Think of how many person-hours have been wasted over the years by speakers failing to communicate their work to listeners who fail to follow it. This is not good for the speakers or the listeners. 

So I’ve long wished for a simple app that provided a button that listeners could push when they reach the point where they are unable to keep up, and conveyed that information anonymously to the speaker. Now, thanks to the “come and they will build it” era of AI tools, I have one, built with the help of Gemini and Lovable. 

The speaker starts a session simply by going to: session-gauge.lovable.app. There appears a QR code / URL that attendees can use to get their “button” on their phone (They can toggle their button on and off repeatedly, if they get lost but recover.) 

On the speaker’s screen a real time plot appears, as the presentation progresses, of the number of people who are lost at any given moment. When the talk finishes the speaker can take a screen shot of the plot (and export a .csv file). If this sounds confusing, just try it, using your computer for the “speaker” and one or more phones or tablets for the “listeners”. 

Ideally speakers would check the plot during their talk and adjust the talk as appropriate; but I expect that would be difficult for a short conference talk. However the app can provide instructive feedback for use afterwards. If you start recording your talk on your phone at the same time as you start the app, you can determine even more precisely what you were presenting when you lost attendee attention. 

The app’s feedback can help you to communicate that material more effectively the next time you present it. E.g. you might give a practice talk to a “home” audience before presenting at a conference. More generally, seeing how audiences truly respond to your talks could help you more effectively communicate your work as you proceed with your career. 

Of course, the app may simply provide evidence that you are already a very clear communicator! 

In a classroom setting, it would be easier to view the plot onscreen on occasion (or even keep it running in an onscreen window) to help the instructor adjust the pace of that day’s lecture in real time. 

(The speaker’s view could be run on your phone while projecting slides on your computer, but this requires a workaround to communicate the QR code or URL to the attendees.)

I’m wondering if this seems like something you, or your grad students, might actually use? It is a rough app, and I might also be up for some tinkering based on feedback. (Or you may want to build a version of your own.)

Perhaps you would be willing to try it before an audience, internally in your lab or classroom, or even for a conference or workshop talk. (IJCAI-ECAI is coming up.) If you do, I recommend you assure your audience that their responses are anonymous and that you want honest feedback. 

I’d be interested to get your take on the app, and excited to hear about any experience you have using it!

— Gene

[Guillaume Derval]

Hello everyone,

This is actually something close to what I used in 2020 when we had to give lessons on Teams. Since I wanted to be a bit fancy, I made my lectures on Twitch (I **nearly** reached the required audience to become a twitch partner and make money. If only that particular COVID wave could have been 1 week longer... 🙃). (And for those who know Twitch etiquette: yes, we did raid other streamers when the lessons ended 😇).

Since everything ran on OBS (I assume this is what people still use today) it was quite easy to tweak what was displayed to the students on Twitch. I had during the last courses a box written "I'm lost" with a counter that was updated in real time; students just had to open a web page and press a button. On the same little app, they could also submit anonymous questions. When the counter was too high, I would stop what I was doing and discuss with the students via the chat (they were pseudonymously hidden behind their twitch account) to see what went wrong. What was nice at the time with Twitch is that the delay between me talking and them hearing what I said was below 5 seconds (which was not the case on Youtube).

It worked quite well, and I remember thinking that, apparently, I was quite bad at estimating what parts of the course were difficult (I'm sure I still am ;-)).

I lost the code of the app (which I made with my bare hands, what wonderful times), so I'll definitely give your app a try, Gene, next time I give a course or a talk!

Since I lost the code, here is the mandatory question: is the app open-source? :-)

Have a nice day,

Guillaume.

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[Eugene Freuder]

Hi Guillaume,

Thanks for this! 

It looks like I can download the codebase and send it to you if you like. 

Best,

Gene

Eugene Freuder

MRIA, FAAAS, FAAAI, FEurAI
Professor Emeritus, UCC
Associate, Harvard SEAS

President, AISOCC
www.freuder.me

[Pierre Schaus]

Hi Gene,

I wish we’d had something like this for the answer-set programming invited talk at CP this year, so I could have checked whether I was the only one struggling to follow (which is entirely possible, especially first slot, after the social dinner).

Thanks for sharing this. I’ll definitely be using it in my classes!

One suggestion: it would be great if the project were open source and hosted on GitHub. That would let the community contribute, fork it, and submit pull requests.

Also, I think the feedback options could be expanded a bit. The “I’m lost” button is useful, but I’d also like to see some positive feedback.

For example, when I attend talks, I sometimes stop paying attention not because the speaker is unclear, but simply because the topic isn’t relevant to me. If speakers knew how many people were actively engaged at the start, it would give much more context to the “lost” signal. Someone who starts engaged and then gets lost tells a very different story than someone who was never interested in the first place. On the other hand, if only a small fraction of the audience is engaged from the beginning, that might say more about the fit between the topic and the audience than about the speaker.

Best,

Pierre

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[Eugene Freuder]

Thanks Pierre!

I’m happy for the project to be open source on GitHub. The question is just what is the best way to arrange this. Perhaps Guillaume and you and I can take that discussion offline. If anyone else wants to join that discussion — especially GitHub or Lovable hackers 🙂 — just reply individually to me to let me know. 

Best,

Gene

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