NASA Office of Logic Design

A scientific study of the problems of digital engineering for space flight systems,
with a view to their practical solution.

Detailed Instructions for Oral  and Workshop Presentations

Dear Poster Presenter/Author,

The instructions on this page will supplement the general presentation instructions for all presentations.

• Backgrounds: The presentations should be on a white background and these work well in our conference room; no shades, use pure white.  What looks great on  your PC at work may look horrible when projected, so we use conservative rules to ensure high production values.  Dark backgrounds are not needed and make printing difficult and expensive.
• Animation: Use of animation and movies during presentations is generally not permitted.  If you feel that animation is necessary to make a technical point, special approval will be required in advance.
• Practice: Make sure that you do several dry runs of your talk.  This will ensure that you finish on time.  Also, the presentation will be smoother and the evaluation forms will be a bit happier.  From our experience, it is very obvious when people have not performed dry runs.  Please, spend an hour or so practicing.
• Focus Your Talk: Be careful that your talk is not too abstract or too project specific.  Also, do not try to cover every good point in your work and wind up rushing through the material, losing the audience.  For your dry runs, it is a good idea to find some engineers who know little or nothing about your work.
• Define your acronyms.  You may include a slide with an acronym list if you like.  Of course, do not speak in TLAs.
• Practice Some More: Sharpen your speaking skills; stay to the main points, minimize "fluff."   Again, this will make the evaluation forms happier.
• Talk to the audience, not to the screen.  Talking to the screen is generally a sign of not having performed dry runs, often presents the audience with a less then flattering view, and often results in poor audio, as your head is turned away from the microphones.  Feel free to bring notes to the podium on a hardcopy of your presentation with key points highlighted if that makes you more comfortable.  We are engineers, not professional orators, and bringing notes is perfectly fine; I often do that.  There is a flat screen monitor embedded in the Amphitheater's podium, slaved to the projector, for your assistance, so you can glance down at the screen and then regain eye contact with the audience.
• Laser pointers seldom are very effective as the small dot tends to move too much.   An alternative which is simple and effective is to place large arrows at key spots of the slide which you wish to reference; you may add letters to them if you need to point to multiple spots and use color.  At a minimum letters should be used to accommodate any colorblind people in the audience and monochrome printing.  Saying, "the flip-flop in the circuit pointed to by the red arrow labeled A can go metastable ..." is preferable to waving the laser pointer around and making people in the first three rows spacesick.
• Time: Oral presentations for Sessions A-E are generally 20 minutes in duration.   Following the presentation there will be nominally 5 minutes of question and answer time, moderated by the Session Chairperson.  The Session  Chairperson can move to the next paper if there are few questions or let the conversation continue, on his judgment.
• File Format: The sessions will be held in a large facility.  It is recommended that your presentation be in either PowerPoint, or .pdf.  Postscript formatted presentations are acceptable provided that they are submitted on-time and any technical problems can be resolved [we have successfully used postscript but it took several iterations for some of the presentations].
• Viewgraphs are not accepted as this facility does not support them.  If you have viewgraphs, please submit them early so that they can be scanned and loaded onto the conference computer/projection system.
• Only single screen presentations are supported.

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Last Revised: February 03, 2010
Web Grunt: Richard Katz