Presentation Instructions

Below are guidelines for presentation, to ensure that presentations can successfully serve their primary purpose of communicating authors’ ideas to conference attendees, and to make presenters aware of some organizational details.

VTCs are successful, friendly, conferences due mainly to the effort and commitment of paper authors.  Since most attendees are authors themselves, there is a camaraderie that comes from everyone being in the same boat. 

Oral presentation slots are 18 minutes long in total—that includes questions and handovers. Session chairs will hold you this time, and are under strict instructions to terminate presentations which overrun.  If your presentation were to overrun, you are effectively stealing time from colleagues which follow you.  Strict adherence to timing within sessions is also required in order to allow attendees to move between sessions.

To allow for questions, you should aim for your presentation to be about 12-13 minutes long, Longer presentations mean that only a single question can be accommodated, or even none at all, and questions are often the most interesting part for both speaker and audience. Remember to include the ‘why’ of your work - not just the ‘how’, and avoid the trap of trying to squeeze in too much detail. Attendees will be able to read your paper at their leisure if it sparks their interest. Practice and time yourself.

Each presentation room is equipped with a computer projector capable of a resolution of 1024 by 748.  Computers will not be provided. If you want to use the computer projector, you must provide your own computer.  You should test this in the room prior to the start of the session (before going for coffee).

If you want to present via computer, but don’t have a laptop, you may be able to present using the laptop of another presenter in the same session.  While we are not able to arrange this for you, your session chair has the contact details of all other presenters in your session. 

Make sure your slides are readable.  Aim for text at least as large as 20pt. Be particularly careful of diagrams and graphs.  Remember the contrast will be lower on the computer projector than on a computer screen.  Black lines against dark colors (anything other than yellow, light green or of course white) can be very difficult to see. 

Presenters should prepare a short (remember the time constraints) biography to allow the session chair to introduce them. Presenters should be in their session from the start and remain until the end, as attendees often wish to ask further questions individually after the session. Each session chair is being sent copies of all the papers in their session, and has been asked to contact you. Session chairs are in the final program on the web site.

Finally, remember your talk may not overrun.  If you risk it, you may end up without the opportunity to present your conclusions, which are the most important part.

We wish you a good trip to Calgary—enjoy the conference!