OutlineSpark: Igniting AI-powered Presentation Slides Creation from Computational Notebooks through Outlines

Abstract: Computational notebooks are widely utilized for exploration and analysis. However, creating slides to communicate analysis results from these notebooks is quite tedious and time-consuming. Researchers have proposed automatic systems for generating slides from notebooks, which, however, often do not consider the process of users conceiving and organizing their messages from massive code cells. Those systems ask users to go directly into the slide creation process, which causes potentially ill-structured slides and burdens in further refinement. Inspired by the common and widely recommended slide creation practice: drafting outlines first and then adding concrete content, we introduce OutlineSpark, an AI-powered slide creation tool that generates slides from a slide outline written by the user. The tool automatically retrieves relevant notebook cells based on the outlines and converts them into slide content. We evaluated OutlineSpark with 12 users. Both the quantitative and qualitative feedback from the participants verify its effectiveness and usability.