Guidelines for oral presentations
Contributed oral presentations will have 20-minute time slots. Speakers should plan to present for no more than 15 minutes, leaving a minimum of 5 minutes for questions and discussion. The 5-minute Q&A session belongs to the audience, not to the presenter. Accordingly, moderators will be asked to interrupt presentations that exceed 15 minutes.
Each room will be equipped with a PC laptop with Microsoft Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat, connected to a LCD projector. Speakers should arrive at least 15 minutes prior to the start of their session (or during coffee break if presenting in the late morning), with their talk loaded on a USB flash drive to transfer to the laptop. Speakers are discouraged from swapping in their own laptops, but may do so if they require special video or other software for their presentations. Connectors for Mac laptops are not provided, so speakers should bring their own, if they must connect their own Mac. Presenters should run through all slides on the conference-provided laptop, to ensure the presentation and all graphics are functional.
Guidelines for invited symposium presentations
Invited symposium presentations will have time slots determined by the symposium organizers. Speakers should plan to leave a minimum of 5 minutes for questions and discussion. For A/V tools, see the guidelines for oral presentations, above.
Guidelines for poster presentations
Posters should be no more than 1.2 meters (4 feet) long or tall. Posters should be placed on the provided poster boards in the Chapel Room as soon as possible after arriving during breaks or in the evening. Social events including morning and afternoon coffee will be held in Chapel, so posters will be visible repeatedly throughout the conference. The main time when you should stand by your poster is during the poster session on Tuesday afternoon at 5pm, January 12.
Important Information About Formatting Oral Presentations (Talks)
This section describes recommended presentation formats and practices for oral presentations. We realize that losing speaking time due to technical glitches or other problems is a frustrating and stressful experience. This information is provided to presenters in advance in order to help minimize problems on the day of your presentation.
• For all formats, we advise presenters to test their slides in advance on a computer provided at the conference site.
• All presenters are expected to arrive at their session room at least 20 minutes in advance of the start of their session. This time is for checking in with the session presider and allows the projectionist to transfer your presentation to the dedicated laptop. Please bring a copy of your presentation on a USB Flash drive.
• Each meeting room will be equipped with a dedicated LCD projector and PC laptop. We discourage speakers swapping in their own laptops.
• Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat are the preferred formats for slides. These file types will work most smoothly on the laptops we provide. Plug-ins have been loaded so that anything created in earlier versions of Office should still open without any issues.
• Please do not use Presenter View in PowerPoint. This often causes problems for the next presenter when multiple slideshows are open at the same time on the same computer. Troubleshooting the settings and restoring them to the defaults often eats into presentation time.
• Presenters may use a different digital slide format as long as it is technically compatible with our laptops. While the preferred formats are less likely to cause any technical problems on the day of your presentation, you may use a different format if you wish to do so; however, it is the speaker’s responsibility to make sure that their presentation will run smoothly. You should save your files in a format compatible with MS Office 2010 for Windows 7. The laptops also have Adobe Flash installed. We strongly advise you to check your presentation in a Speaker Ready Room in advance if you are using one of these other formats.
• There are some formats which often do not work on our laptops! Corel presentations, embedded videos, animations, and Mac file formats typically cause problems. If you plan to use these, make sure they are working beforehand.
• You may use your own laptop for your presentation if necessary. We recommend testing your presentation on our laptops first since disconnecting and reconnecting speakers’ computers can disrupt sessions. If you do need to use your own PC or Mac laptop, you will need to connect it to the LCD projector. We ask that you be considerate of the presenter following you and make sure your technical setup does not take away from any of their presentation time. Please arrive at your session early to make sure that you and/or the A/V volunteer can disconnect and reconnect the dedicated laptop without any problems.
• Mac users will need to bring their own VGA dongle. ASN does not provide these adapters.
• Laser pointers will be provided for each session. These will be picked up in advance by the session presiders.