Coming on stage in 1973 to deliver a talk in connection with receiving the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Patrick Winston brought with him a big, white cube. The “blocks world” was a popular “mini-world” at the time for studying AI, which Patrick had used in his thesis on machine learning (video), so this cube was a natural “visual aid”. It rose to the level of a “gimmick” when Patrick took a bite out of the big, white cube. It was made of angel food cake.

I remember that talk almost 50 years later. And I wasn’t even there; I heard about it second hand. When I gave an invited talk at a AAAI conference, naturally involving constraint satisfaction, I began by playing into the microphone the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction“. This was before smart phones and Spotify, so I went to some trouble to reliably produce that effect, purchasing a handheld digital recorder. If anyone remembers anything from that talk, they remember that song.

I once gave a talk on a problem decomposition technique where the talk was explicitly patterned after Ron Popeil’s iconic pitch for the Veg-O-Matic (“it slices, it dices”). (When you think about it, we can learn a lot about effective communication from late night infomercials; they certainly understand enthusiasm.) Years later I chatted with someone who spontaneously recalled my use of that gimmick. Ian Gent used juggling to illustrate the phase transition in a talk I’ll always remember. (He later reprised his juggling act for a YouTube video.)

People hear talks all the time. At a conference they hear dozens in a short span of time. It is worth thinking about how you can make yours stand out.