ORAL PRESENTATIONS

The International Advisory Board will select the most relevant papers to be presented orally at the Conference. This will be done after reaching the abstract submission deadline to ensure that the proposed paper is relevant for the Conference. Notification of paper acceptance to be presented orally will be sent by 27 February 2009.

Those papers which have not been selected to be presented orally will be able to be presented as posters.

You are recommended to read the following instructions before preparing your communication:

Each talk is 15 minutes long. Use the available time in the proper way. It is recommended to use 12 minutes to expound and 3 minutes to discuss. Oral presentations timing will be listed in the Conference Program to let attendees select the talks they wish to attend. Consequently, sessions chairpeople will strictly enforce these time limits. The following points should be taken into consideration when preparing your oral presentation:

• Ideally, use Microsoft PowerPoint to prepare your presentation. Please, inform the Organizers if you need any special software or equipment.
• Try to keep the appearance of your slides simple and as consistent as possible, e.g. by using a recurring ‘style theme’.
• Wording should be large and as legible as possible.
• Consideration should be given to colour blindness when choosing colours for your presentation e.g. avoid use of red and green together on graphs.
• Colours and background of slides have a large impact. White letters reversed out of a black background are far more effective than black letters on a white background. Likewise, the choice of colours should be considered e.g. yellow lettering on a blue background provides a good visual effect.
• Simple and effective graphics will enhance the presentation. Information presented in the form of ‘pie charts’, bar charts or graphs is easier to relate and understand than lists of information.
• Excessive use of animations (e.g. titles flying in from right & left) is not advised as these will probably distract the viewer and may detract from the content of the slide. If you wish to use these, please keep them as simple as possible.
• Each slide should contain only the main points that need to be conveyed. Overcrowding of the slide with tiny text should be avoided particularly if it is only to be shown for a short space of time. These main points can be elaborated upon in the talk.
• Where possible each slide should be restricted to one idea. A theme can always be enlarged with further slides, building from the original.
• Handouts provided during the meeting are discouraged. It is both time-consuming & distracting to the audience.
• Ensure that you are available no less than 15 minutes before the start of the session in which your presentation is scheduled. Presenters are advised to load their presentations in the laptop provided by the Organization during the previous break before their talks.
• The Organization will provide presenters with the usual visual equipment for this kind of presentations, which will include a laptop with Windows O.P. and a laser pointer. If you needed another kind of visual equipment, please let us know. If some presenter wants to use his/her own laptop, the full compatibility between author's own equipments and on-site display facilities should be carefully checked before the start of the session. You will be responsible for promptly connecting to the projector. The presentation timer will begin immediately after the introduction by the session chair, and there will not be time to reboot your computer. For this reason, you are strongly encouraged to test laptop connections to the projector. Anyway, technical support will be provided by the Organization.
  

POSTER PRESENTATIONS

Participants who have selected poster as presentation modality at the Conference will be able to start preparing their posters once they receive the abstract acceptance notification (sent between 10-15 days after submission)

You are recommended to read the following instructions before preparing your poster:

• Display times:
  As each poster will be included in only one session of the Conference Scientific Program, each poster will be only exhibited the whole day in which the session is scheduled. Posters should be set up in the morning of the presentation day and they will not be removed until the end of the day, unless otherwise is stated.
  Authors are expected to be at their poster when its session is scheduled.
• Posters identificators and locations:
  Posters will be displayed in the atrium of the venue. An identifier, which you will find in the Conference Scientific Program, will be assigned to your presentation. A card with your identifier will be posted on each display panel to indicate the location for your poster.
• Dimensions and attachment:
  The poster can be up to 1m high x 0.80m wide. We will provide materials for attaching posters.
  
• Format:
  Your poster should be readable from a distance of 2 meters. Suggested font sizes:
  • The title should be capitalized with lettering 2cm high (72 point) at least.
  • Authors and affiliations should be 11mm high (42 point) at least.
  • Text lettering should be 5mm high (18 point) with a line thickness of 1mm at least.
  • Be careful also in your use of colours, some people are red-green colour blind and some colours do not stand out in contrast to others.
    
• Content:
  Information should be well organized and concisely presented. Your poster could include the following sections:
  • Title: short and informative.
  • Abstract: again this should be informative. The aim is to put your work into context.
  • Materials and Methods: these have to be short but remember to include them without incomprehensible acronyms etc. Others want to know clearly what you are doing and they might want to use some of the same materials or methods.
  • Results: you are very limited in what you present. Choose the material which best explains what you have found and which can be logically developed to tell your story:
    a) Do not put in too much information;
    b) Do not put in graphs, pictures, tables, etc. which have no explanation.
  • Discussion/ Conclusions: have your results provided an answer to the questions which you originally posed? If not, are there alternative answers?

Make sure that your material is presented in a logical and clear sequence so that people can read it and understand it. If you wish, you can provide the audience with copies of the poster reduced in size.