Oral Presentation Guidelines

All plenary and oral sessions will take place at the Washington State Convention Center.

Logistics

• Presentations will be given using the computers provided by the Conference. Presenters’ personal computers cannot be used.
• Presenters are required to submit an electronic version of their talk at least one day prior to their presentation to the Speaker Preparation Room (Room 618) at the Washington State Convention Center. Files are reviewed, scanned for viruses and loaded onto the appropriate computers in the session rooms. Changes to submitted files will not be allowed.
• Using removable media (USB drives) is prohibited on the computers in oral session rooms. Saving data to and from them is not possible.
• Files transferred to the session computers cannot be copied by anyone and will be deleted after the Conference. Anyone wishing to receive a copy of the slides should contact the presenter, not ASC.
• Presentations must be submitted in Microsoft Power Point 2016 or PDF format. Acceptable media include CD and USB flash drive. Macintosh computers will not be available in any of the session rooms. Authors using a Macintosh must ensure their presentations operate correctly using Microsoft Office 2016 or Adobe Acrobat in the Windows environment.
• All session rooms are equipped with a LCD projector, computer, microphones, laser pointer, timer and screen. The laptops in the oral session rooms are not equipped to accommodate audio sound.
• The plenary session room (6ABC) as well as oral session rooms 6A, 6B and 6C will have a screen for 16:9 presentation format. All other oral session rooms will be in 4:3 format (1024 x 768 resolution). Please check the room assignment for your session to make sure the presentation is prepared for the appropriate screen resolution.
• Contributed presentations are 15 minutes; arrange your talk so that your presentation lasts 12 – 13 minutes with 2 – 3 minutes available for questions.
• Invited presentations are 30 minutes; arrange your talk so that your presentation lasts 25 minutes with 5 minutes available for questions.
• Arrive a few minutes before the session and introduce yourself to the session moderators before the start of the session.
• There will be no rearrangement of papers within an oral session to accommodate absences or cancellations. The time assigned to an oral presentation within the oral session is fixed.
• A paper written from its presentation will not be considered for publication in the special conference issue of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity (TAS) if the presentation was not given during its scheduled time at the Conference.
• If you need to make changes or withdraw your abstract from the program BEFORE the conference, please contact Centennial Conferences via email. If you need to make changes or withdraw your presentation from the program ON-SITE at the Conference, please advise the staff in the Publications Office (Room 619) at the Colorado Convention Center. Please be sure to provide your presentation/program ID number (e.g. 1EOr1A-01, 4MOr2A-02, 5LOr1C-04, etc.) in any correspondence.

Content Organization

• Plan one slide per minute: 8 to 12 slides for Contributed Oral, and up to 25 slides per Invited Oral.
• Carefully budget your time. Allocate at least one minute to describe the problem clearly enough for the audience to appreciate the value of your contribution.
• Make sure the audience walks away understanding the five things any listener to a presentation really cares about:
  • What is the problem and why?
  • What has been done about it?
  • What is the presenter doing (or has done) about it?
  • What additional value does the presenter’s approach provide?
  • Where do we go from here?

Fonts

• Select a Sans-serif fonts: Arial or Helvetica. Avoid Serif fonts such as Times New Roman: the Serif fonts are more difficult to read.
• Select font size to be visible over the whole room. We recommend font 24. Do not use fonts less than 18 points.
• Consider font embedding to ensure that characters display properly.
• Use larger fonts to indicate importance.
• Use different sizes and styles (e.g., bold) for impact. Avoid italicized fonts as these are difficult to read quickly.
• Avoid long sentences, Avoid abbreviations and acronyms. Limit punctuation marks.
• No more than six lines per slide, and no more than 6-8 words per line.
• Do not use all caps except for titles.

Design and Graphical Images

• Include only necessary information: Content should be self-evident.
• Keep the background consistent and subtle.
• Use one or two large images rather than several small images.
• Limit the tables to four rows/columns for readability.
• Charts: The number of curves should be four or less. Label axes, curves and captions clearly using readable letters, font 18 or larger.
• Limit the number of colors on a single screen.
• Keep the design clean and uncluttered. Leave empty space around the text and graphical images.
• Limit the number of graphical images on each slide.
• Avoid sound effects.
• Minimize animation.

More helpful tips can be found here.

The Speaker Preparation Room is located in Room 618. The hours of operation are as follows: