Presenter information
Cosyne is an inherently interdisciplinary meeting, and its success relies on the effort that participants make to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. These include neurobiology, psychology, medicine, physics, engineering (biomedical, electrical, mechanical), applied mathematics, statistics. Please: try to avoid unnecessary jargon and excessive amounts of mathematics, and where it is necessary, define it and provide intuitive explanations/interpretations.
Oral presentations
The oral sessions of Cosyne are arranged in a single track, and thus most meeting attendees will be at your talk. As such, it is critically important that your talk be designed for a general audience and not for experts in your subfield.
Talk slots are 20 minutes (40 minutes for invited talks, 60 for keynote). This includes time for questions, so you should aim to finish in about 15 minutes (35 for invited talks, 55 for keynote). Due to tightness of the schedule, these times will be strictly enforced: Please rehearse your presentation so that the timing is predictable.
When viewed from the back of the room, your projected slides will subtend roughly five degrees of visual angle (the width of your hand at arm's length). Please verify that your slides will be legible when viewed at that size.
Please bring your laptop to the projectionist during the break before your talk session, to connect it and verify that settings are appropriate. If your laptop requires an adaptor to connect to a VGA cable, please remember to bring it.
Posters
Poster boards are 96" x 48" (width x height), but they have a metal frame so the usable area is 91" x 45" (231cm x 114cm). Each board will be labeled with the poster number (e.g., II-42), which you will find on the online program listing, and also in the program booklet that you will receive at the meeting. Thumbtacks and tape will be provided onsite.
At least one author is expected to present the poster during the scheduled session. Posters for session I may be put up any time beteen 4pm and the start of the session (8:45pm). Posters for sessions II/III should be put up during the lunch break, and remain up during the afternoon so that attendees can preview them. All posters should be taken down by 1:00AM, or the hotel staff will discard them.
Use large fonts (suggested minimum: 30point), and do not overload with text! The poster should be comfortable to read from a distance of five feet. Use your poster as a visual aid, much the way you would use slides. Top-to-bottom ordering of content (as opposed to standard left-to-right used in western text) is preferred, as it allows multiple people to view the content in parallel without colliding.
Most of your listeners will want to hear a fairly short description (10 min), and it is worth practicing this in advance. You can always lengthen it if the audience asks for more detail. You may also want to bring single-page reproductions of your poster to hand out.
Spotlight presentations
In addition to presenting a poster, spotlight presenters will give a 4-minute oral summary of their work on the afternoon preceding their poster presentation. The time will be strictly enforced, and there will be no time for questions.
Please limit your presentation to to 2 slides, emphasizing only the main message of your poster. Do not to squeeze the full contents of your poster into these slides! Rehearse your presentation so that the timing is predictable.
Please bring your laptop to the projectionist during the break before your spotlight session, to connect it and verify that settings are appropriate.
