Today I saw Brian Potetz's thesis proposal. It was pretty neat. It was about doing depth inference from monocular static input, which is pretty tough, even though humans do it well. To put the bundle of jargon preceding in plain english, "telling how far away things are even with one eye shut without moving your head around". Of course, when humans do this they are helped out by having a sophisticated prior model of what sort of objects they are likely to find out in the world, and what these objects usually look like and do. Brian's proposal seemed to be about more strongly putting such a prior model into algorithms for doing this mechanically.
Anyhow, one thing I'd definitely like to do when I have to give talks that involve a party who only participates over the phone (as is typical of thesis proposals and defenses, what with the requirement of having an external committee member) is to rig up some AJAXety-like thing with the Flash so that the external member can just go to the right URL and see a "live" version of the current slide rather than having to remember to say "next slide" or refer to page numbers or whatever. If the external member wants to also flip forward and back independently from which slide I'm showing, then he or she could theoretically just load up the real slides in a separate window, but maybe I could integrate that functionality just to make it simpler.