ISSTA 2004 Speaker Guidelines

High-quality presentations are essential for the success of ISSTA. To help you plan your presentation for ISSTA, this page provides information about the audiovisual equipment that will be available in the meeting rooms, along with guidelines to help you prepare and deliver your presentation. Please read these guidelines carefully and contact the Program Chair if you have any questions.

The Setting

• Your presentation will be held in one of the meeting rooms at the OMNI Parker House Hotel. This room will be equipped with the following presentation equipment:
  • one portable clip-on microphone
  • one screen
  • one electronic data projector, with a hookup for a laptop.
• For all conference sessions, we are expecting that authors will bring and use their own laptops for their presentation. The meeting room does not have internet connectivity, so all presentation materials (or in the case of Tools papers, demo software) that you need must be accessible to you on your laptop. If you are unable to bring a laptop with your talk on it to the conference, or if you wish to use some other projection medium, please contact me soon and we can make other arrangements.
• Each session has a session chair, who will coordinate your session and introduce you. Check the ISSTA program for the name of your session chair. Make sure you (1) meet your session chair earlier in the conference prior to your session so that he/she will know who you are and how to introduce you; (2) meet your session chair at the front of the meeting room at least 20 minutes before the beginning of your session, and make sure your laptop works properly when hooked up to the projector.

YOUR PRESENTATION

Here are some hints for both the preparation and delivery of your high-quality talk:

• All presentations have been allotted 30 minutes. For technical paper presentations, this includes 25 minutes for your talk, and 5 minutes for questions. For tools paper presentations, this also includes 25 minutes for presentation and 5 for questions, but at least 10 of the 25 minutes should be devoted to a tool demonstration, which we hope can be accomplished from your laptop, attached to the projector, directly following your talk. We've scheduled tools papers to be the last talks in sessions, so that interested audience members can come to the front of the room following the session to ask additional questions. It is critical that you present your talk and answer questions in the time allotted to you, and your session chair will manage times to ensure that things are kept on track.
• Make sure that your talk includes enough background material and motivation so that it can be understood by those who are not specialists in your area. It is a good idea to have one slide of your talk on motivation and one slide on related work to set the stage.
• Use at least 24 point type for body text and at least 28 point for titles.
• Use a limited number of typefaces (i.e., 1-3) and a limited number of effective colors (i.e. 1-5) for your entire presentation.
• Important: Use PowerPoint animation only sparingly. Excessive animation results in talks where the animation is more important than the contents. Moreover, completely animated or timed PowerPoint presentations (i.e., "click-less" talks) rarely work for an ISSTA audience because a single question can mess up the entire talk.