Presentations

A conference presentation is a prepared talk or demonstration, given by one or more speakers, to a live audience of in-person and online attendees. These presentations are intended to inform, educate and share ideas with an audience of peers, experts, or other interested parties in the field of Research Software Engineering. We are offering a variety of presentation lengths, with additional time for questions. Where possible, presentations will be grouped together on similar topics.

Planning Your Submission

Talks

Talks involve one or more speakers delivering a prepared presentation to an audience. They are primarily focused on presenting specific ideas or projects within a limited time frame where the aim is to inform, educate, or persuade the audience on a particular topic or issue. There is limited audience interaction, usually reserved for questions at the end of the presentation.Talks focus on sharing information and experience. If you would like to demonstrate technical skills, you could consider submitting a Workshop or a Walkthrough instead.

Talks also typically represent a single point of view, whether yours or that of your collaborators. If you would like to showcase a diversity of viewpoints, you could consider submitting a Panel.

The programme can cater for three lengths of Talks:

• 15 minutes, consisting of a 10-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions
• 30 minutes, consisting of a 25-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions
• 45 minutes, consisting of a 40-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions

You will be asked to indicate your preferred length during submission, but may be contacted and asked if you would accept a slot with a shorter length.

Topics for talks could include:

• Highlighting a piece of research software work that has been successful
• Raising awareness of a tool or technique that others could find useful
• Sharing lessons learned during a software project, regardless of its success

Topics for Talks have previously included:

• The Other Kind of Accessible: removing software barriers for disabled researchers and RSEs
• Standardising UK Trusted Research Environments in the Open
• An infrastructure as code template for data processing workflows on AWS

You are welcome to refer to these, and others in last year’s programme, for ideas on how to present your submissions. Please bear in mind that our conference themes change each year, and previous abstracts may not fully address the type of information requested during our submission process this year.

Walkthroughs

Walkthroughs are presenter-led demonstrations that involve guiding participants through a process, and providing commentary and explanations along the way (e.g. live-coding or executing lines of a pre-prepared notebook). You may wish to supplement your live demonstrations with slides or pre-recorded material. Whilst primarily intended for technical topics please don’t be put off from making submissions on non-technical topics (e.g. project management tool). When planning your Walkthrough, the goal is to keep your scope narrow and focus on the depth of content; aim to provide attendees with a good understanding of one particular aspect of a tool rather than presenting a broad insight into a range of features.

The Walkthrough should educate the audience about a tool or technique, and you will ideally provide enough detail to enable the audience to duplicate the process in their own time. If you would like to deliver a session where the attendees follow along in real-time using their own device, you could consider submitting a Workshop.

The programme can cater for three lengths of Walkthrough:

• 15-minutes, consisting of a 10-minute demonstration with 5-minutes for questions
• 30-minutes, consisting of a 25-minute demonstration with 5-minutes for questions
• 45-minutes, consisting of a 40-minute demonstration with 5-minutes for questions

You will be asked to indicate your preferred length during submission, but may be contacted and asked if you would accept a slot with a shorter length.

Topics for Walkthroughs have previously included:

• A continuous integration workflow for HPC using Singularity, HPC-Rocket and FieldCompare
• Using SYCLomatic to Make GPU Code Cross-Platform
• Designing complex, reusable and scalable scientific workflows with Pydra

You are welcome to refer to these, and others in last year’s programme, for ideas on how to present your submissions. Please bear in mind that conference themes and requested information change each year, so the abstracts there may not fully address this year’s themes and submission layout.

Information Required for Submission

When submitting your proposal for a Talk or Walkthrough you will need to consider:

• Title: Should describe what your submission is about (max 50 words)
• Abstract: A brief and attention-grabbing summary of your submission. People will read your title and abstract in the conference programme when deciding which sessions to attend. (max 250 words)
• Prerequisites: Describe the required skills or knowledge for an attendee to fully engage with your submission. Have you considered how accessible your session will be to a diverse conference audience (attendees comprise people from academia, industry, charity and government, from beginners to experts)? (max 150 words)
• Outcomes: How will your attendees benefit from your session? What do you expect them to gain/learn? (max 150 words)
• Accessibility: Please comment on how you will ensure your content is accessible, which may include referring to relevant sections of the conference’s accessibility guidance, as well as any other considerations. Some key pieces to consider are:
  • Visually, have you considered the colours chosen as well as the shape and size of graphics and fonts?
  • You can also use automated accessibility checking tools to help ensure that you haven’t missed anything.
• Hybrid Delivery: We appreciate that you may not have fully-formed answers to these questions at this stage, but your responses will enable the organisers to support you in delivering a successful presentation.
  • How will you ensure that both remote and in-person participants have a comparable experience?
  • Is there anything that might pose a challenge to streaming your proposal?

You will also be asked to provide:

• Author list: Please add all authors who will contribute to the submission
• Presentation Type: (checkbox)
• Presentation Length: (checkbox)
• Research Software Development Principles: Please select the Research Software Development Principles which will feature in your presentation. For clarification see information about these principles.(checklist)
• In-person or Online Delivery: (checklist)
• Reviewing Submissions: We need help to review submissions. Would you be interested in learning more about becoming a reviewer? (checkbox)
• Mentorship: If your submission is accepted, would you like a mentor? Subject to availability.