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SNUG India 2008
July 10-11, 2008
Author's Kit
ADDTIONAL READING:
Copyright Statement
Please read the following notice before submitting your written materials to the SNUG program.
By submitting materials to the SNUG program you and your employer are giving Synopsys the following rights: (1) to reproduce, publish and distribute your submitted materials in SNUG proceedings for use by Synopsys employees, contractors and licensees; and (2) to reproduce and post the submitted materials on the SNUG web site for access by Synopsys employees, contractors, and licensees.
It is your responsibility to confirm that your employer agrees to the use described above. You and your employer reserve the right to modify the submitted materials at any time. Synopsys shall reproduce any copyright or other legal notices that you include in your submitted materials. Synopsys will not use your submitted materials for product marketing purposes without first obtaining your express written consent.
If you have any questions or comments regarding your submission or the submission process, please contact the SNUG India Team .
Introduction
This is your opportunity to address some of the top high-level designers in the world. SNUG is an important event in your professional career. Your selection by the SNUG technical committee represents a significant accomplishment, but the selection is just the first step towards success. This document will describe the process for developing a successful paper and presentation, as well as offer suggestions on helping you develop and deliver your talk.
Dates for Authors to Remember
25 Feb - 18 April 2008 |
Call for Papers |
8 May 2008 |
Notification of Acceptance |
15 May 2008 |
In-Depth Outline Due |
26 May 2008 |
Draft Paper Due |
2 June 2008 |
Final Paper Due |
9 June 2008 |
Draft Slides Due |
16 June - 20 June 2008 |
Dry Run Practice at Synopsys |
24 June 2008 |
Final Slides Due |
10 - 11 July 2008 |
SNUG India 2008 Conference |
NOTE: Submission of both a paper and presentation slides are *required* to present at SNUG India.
Writing Your Paper
Format
Please submit your paper in Microsoft Word 2003 format. Please download the template from the following link:
http://www.snug-universal.org/asia/india08_paper_template.doc
Paper Review Process
Your paper will be reviewed by a member(s) of the SNUG India Technical Committee. These reviewers are provided to help you produce the highest quality paper. Papers will be reviewed on the following:
- Technical Relevance: Is the topic meaningful to other professionals?
- Technical Completeness: Is the topic explored completely?
- Are the problems and solutions well described?
- Is the conclusion well substantiated?
- Technical Applicability: Is the topic general enough to be helpful to other high-level designers?
- General Readability: Is the paper well organized?
- Is the paper grammatically correct and spelled correctly?
Creating Your Presentation
Getting Started
As an author/speaker at SNUG, you have two methods to convey your ideas: A published paper and an accompanying verbal/visual presentation. Each medium has its own characteristics.
Since your formal paper will be read, you should use your presentation as a "discussion" rather than a "reading". Verbal presentations read from technical papers come across as dull and monotonous. Consequently, you need to prepare a separate script for your talk. Your verbal/visual presentation must be created for listeners who are watching you and your slides, not for readers. Readers set their own pace, absorbing input according to their individual needs, but listeners do not have this advantage. Therefore, you will need to control the pace according to how long it takes the audience to absorb your ideas.
For these reasons, the printed papers and technical presentations require different methods, different verbage, different illustrations, and different ways to present argument and proof. The precise language and style used in written papers are not suited for oral presentations. Long sentences, when spoken, cannot be followed easily since a listener does not have enough time to reflect on a complex idea without falling behind the speaker. Nor can a listener look ahead to anticipate what you will be saying next in order to place an idea in context. Unfamiliar terms may lose a listener since there is no chance to look up definitions, while technical abstractions or complicated formulae can lead to complete confusion.
It follows that the script for your talk requires a different approach than your paper. Because your paper has been selected for SNUG India 2008, your audience will grant that you are technically proficient and that your work has a basic adequacy. Many of them will have already read your paper in the pre-proceedings on-line. They will expect to hear you discuss your techniques, talk about your approach, and support your conclusions.
You should be less formal, less analytical when speaking to the audience. Your gestures and personality should give life to your words. Emphasis and inflection become very important tools. You should organize your talk so that the sentences are simpler and shorter, and the main points are repeated to aid memory and understanding. Speak slowly and clearly while utilizing emphatic pauses: These pauses require a listener to absorb the preceding point.
Organizing Your Talk
Each presentation is about 30 minutes in which you will be spending about 20min for delivering the presentation and 10 minutes for Q&A. Plan to use all of your allotted time. A presentation that is too short is as undesirable as one which runs over so you will need to adjust and trim your timing in your rehearsals.
Put Across a Few Key Points
The audience has a professional interest in your subject. They want to find out how your ideas will affect their work, or better yet, how they can use your ideas for their benefit. In your relatively short time at the lectern, you can transmit only a few key points to the audience, so concentrate on what is most significant and hold to relatively simple relationships. Your audience can confirm your more complex points by reading your paper. Explain with familiar examples or analogies, and compare your new material with existing technology that is well known to your audience. Resist using jargon because your jargon may not be as widely used as you think. If you must use a word that may not be familiar to the audience, define it.
Follow a Simple Outline
- Introduce your problem. What led to your work? What were your goals?
- Describe your solution. Tell how you did it. Why is your solution a good one?
- What are its disadvantages or limitations?
- Suggest other applications.
- Do you recommend further development along the lines of your work? Why? Or why not?
- Summarize what it all means.
Tell your story in a straight line, and make one point lead to the next. Comprehension is better when the subject is organized simply.
Planning Your Slides
Since good technical talks are an effective mix of verbal and visual elements, spend about as much time on your slides as you did on your paper. Plan a series of slides that progressively disclose your subject by building from cause to effect, simple to more complex, and questions to answers. Do not bury your points in too much detail and make sure that the text on your slides is concise. Each slide should express only a few closely related ideas, tersely stated. Too much information prevents understanding and too many details prevents easy reading! Use your slides to assist your words and to keep you on track.
How Many Slides?
Use the minimum number of slides that will allow you to convey the essence of your paper to your audience. You have 20 minutes for your actual presentation. Experience tells us that most SNUG talks do well with between 10 to 15 slides.
What to Illustrate
You have probably been working on the subject of your paper for months. What is perfectly clear to you must be made clear in minutes to people unfamiliar with your work. Your slides can help you to accomplish this goal. Since words have limitations you may want to illustrate what you cannot verbalize, what you want to emphasize, or what takes too long to describe. Graphs, drawings and photos can often explain what language cannot. Use your slides to hold attention, enliven, clarify, restate, explain, and interpret. Ears have trouble accepting numbers and abstractions. In addition, quantities and relationships must be visually compared. When you digress from the topic of the slide on the screen, use a blank slide, colored and shaded, not white, to darken the screen. Furthermore, it will confuse your audience if you say one thing orally and you display something else visually on the screen.
Consider these graphic ways to make points clearly and quickly when you plan your slides:
- Introduce Key Items -- Outline slides focus attention on key ideas and orient the audience. An outline of your major topics should be your second slide, just after your title slide.
- Trends -- Line graphs show trends or correlation effectively.
- Comparisons and Proportions -- Bar graphs are best for comparing magnitudes. Pie charts are good for showing relative parts of the whole.
- Symbols -- Symbolic diagrams and flow charts are useful if not too detailed. Use standard symbols if possible.
- Structure and Relationship -- Simple schematic diagrams effectively convey the structure of systems or relationships of objects. Show only what is necessary to explain how a thing works.
- Tables -- Do not use detailed tables. Tabular data is more legible and more easily compared on graphs or charts. If you must use a table, keep it simple and include only items that you will mention.
- Duplicate Slides -- Use duplicate slides when you need to refer to a visual more than once.
Suggested Slides
These four slides should be included in your presentation:
- Title Slide -- The first slide in your presentation must contain the title of the paper, the author name(s) and affiliation(s).
- Purpose Slide -- The second slide should state the purpose of the work you will describe (i.e., the problem you have addressed).
- Outline Slide -- The third slide should present a concise outline of your presentation.
- Conclusion Slide -- The last slide in your presentation should state your major conclusions.
Please submit your presentation in PowerPoint 2003 format. Please download the template from the following link:
http://www.snug-universal.org/asia/india08_slides_template.ppt
Dry Run Presentation
Rehearsal is the most important part of preparing your talk! Please do not let it slip by! Thorough preparation will improve your performance and make you more relaxed. SNPS has scheduled a formal dry run on June 16 - 20, 2008 at Synopsys Bangalore office. More details on the dry run schedule will be communicated to you at later date.
The SNUG audience will be a group of professionals, all of them interested as proven by their presence. But remember that many of them may not be well-versed in your particular topic. They came to learn from you. Address your talk to them, not to colleagues familiar with your work!
Presenting Tips
For presentation tips please refer the following link:
http://www.snug-universal.org/northamerica/present_tips.pdf
On the Day of the Conference
At SNUG, the audience for each session is typically about 100 to 200 attendees.
How Should You Dress?
This is a commonly asked question. Some presenters wear suits and ties, but most wear more casual-dress clothes. You should wear something that looks nice, since you will be standing in front of 100 to 200 of your peers, yet wear something that you are comfortable in - that is the most critical requirement. Please, no t-shirts, jeans, shorts or sandals!
What Happens in Your Session?
Your session will be presided over by a Session Moderator who will introduce speakers, control timing, and preside over discussion periods.
Giving Your Talk
Oral communication depends largely on what listeners receive through their eyes. If you are alert, enthusiastic, and confident, your audience will sense it. Be eager to share information and you will convince your audience. Do not read your paper, instead converse with your audience as you might talk in a conversation.
You will have a wireless microphone, so you will have more freedom of movement but you must remember to face your body in the same direction as your head when you speak. Normally, of course, this is towards the audience. If you talk while looking back at the screen, the mike pickup will be poor, and if you then look down at your notes and speak, you will "blast" the mike. Face the audience, speak distinctly with normal volume. Also, do not use the optical pointer if you are nervous. When you use a pointer, point to an object when first mentioning it, then turn the pointer off. Otherwise, it causes too much of a distraction.
With a well-prepared, well-rehearsed talk, supported by clear, readable slides, you can be confident of giving an excellent technical presentation that will enlighten and educate your audience at SNUG. Your presentation and your paper in the online proceedings of SNUG India 2008 will enhance your professional reputation and bring credit to your company or university.
Contact Information
Please contact the SNUG India Team if you have any questions.
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