Speakers will find some information concerning their presentation at the ESTSP conference below.

• Authors have 20 minutes to present their contribution plus 5 minutes for the questions. 
• An overhead projector, a slide projector, a beamer and a PC are available.
• Slides must be arranged with the session chairman before the beginning of the session.  
• Transparencies should be used in landscape orientation.
• Do not use too small fonts in your slides; do not forget that you will show them in a room sized for about 100 people!
• A beamer (data projector) that can be connected to a PC is available.  The resolution of the available projector is 1024 x 768. A PC with the latest versions of Powerpoint and Acrobat Reader will be available BUT we STRONGLY suggest that you bring your own laptop.
• The connection between the projector and your laptop must be tested before the beginning of your session, preferably the day before your presentation.
  Problems with computers, with the projector itself, or with the connection between them, may still happen.  Even if you decide to use the data projector, please thus bring a copy of your presentation on transparencies, as backup solution.

Please do not forget that the ESTSP conference gathers researchers from various disciplines (neural networks, statistics, data analysis, biology, etc.).  Everyone cannot know everything; so probably many conference participants do not know your research field.  

During your presentation, if you go straight to your specific development without taking time to explain the background, there is a risk that many attendees will not understand your point.  We thus strongly suggest you to take time during your presentation to explain what you did and why you did it (background, reasons to study this specific point, where your development could be used, etc.). 

The details on how you did your work are probably too much detailed to be presented orally in 15 minutes.  Please restrict yourself to the points that are necessary to understand what you did, but avoid too much details that will make your presentation too complicated. These details are contained in the proceedings, and anyone interested in your talk has the possibility to read them after the conference.

To make it more explicit: There is no hope that participants to a conference (ESTSP or another one...) will understand and memorize the details of about 20 presentations/day during three days.  The purpose of oral presentations is then to arouse the interest of the participants to your work.  If you succeeded in convincing them that your work is interesting, they have the possibility to read more details in the proceedings and even to contact you personally for a deeper discussion. Oral presentations are thus complementary to the paper in the proceedings, instead of a simple summary of it.

Unfortunately, too many presentations in many conferences are bad quality due to the quality of the slides. It is impossible to give detailed rules on how to create good slides, because general rules simply do not exist. But it is easy to give some "do" and "do not" tips...

• Choose an adequate number of slides; for a 15 minutes presentation, around 10 slides (including titles) is OK.
• Do not take several slides (and therefore several minutes...) to present concepts that everybody knows in the room (for example, do not remind the back-propagation algorithm in a conference about neural networks...).
• On the contrary, do not include too much details in your presentation; never forget that your talk will be appreciated only if the participants understand it (at least at 90%)! Among all details that are contained in your paper, make a choice for your presentation and refer the participants to the proceedings for more details!
• Do not follow the logical order of your paper for the oral presentation. A typical example is when the paper ends with convincing applications of your new theory; in your presentation, begin with the examples: people will be much more interested in listening to the end of your talk!
• Even if your topic is a mathematical development, limit the number of equations in your slides to a minimum. Do not prove a theorem in your slides, but refer to the proceedings for a proof!
• Whenever it is possible, replace text and equations by illustrations. Yes, it takes much more time to prepare slides with illustrations, but often it is the only way to make your point understood in 15 minutes!
• Repeat your talk in front of several people having the same background as the participants to the conference. Try to find a few people having some knowledge in neural networks, but not in the topic of your paper (do not choose your co-authors...). And follow their advice!

In summary: use your common sense to evaluate how your talk could be best understood by the average participant of the conference (neither by the specialist of your topic nor by the chief cook of the convention center...), and choose the content of your slides for the average participant!

• Posters can occupy a maximum surface of 117 cm (height) x 87 cm (width). It is recommended to use large fonts and drawings to make the poster readable at a distance of about 80 cm. Do not use a photocopy of your paper...
• Posters will be fixed on the panels with pins (pins will be provided). Please avoid the use of one heavy poster of the full size of the board, which may be difficult to fix with pins. Comparing to the heavy plastic coated posters, posters on paper are easier for carrying and hanging! Even posters printed on a set of (preferably A3) sheets may be used too.

Please read the ESTSP programme to know if your poster will be presented on Thursday. Posters should be hanged before lunch time and removed at the end of the day, after the poster session.

Each poster will be presented in one minute during an oral session by its authors, in the form of a "spotlight". This means that you should use one slide only to show what your work is about, but not how it was done.

The spotlight is intended to raise the interest of the participants and to encourage them to have a closer look of your poster during the poster session.

The one-minute limit must be strictly followed. You should thus use one slide only.

The use of a beamer (data projector) connected to a laptop is NOT authorized for the spotlights: the time needed to switch from one laptop to another would be excessive compared to the one-minute slot!

If you do not wish to present a spotlight, please inform the registration desk the day before your poster presentation (on Wednesday morning for those of you who present a poster on Wednesday), so we can inform the chairman of the session.