September 22 - 23, 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 program manager at 1-800-344-SNUG.
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
| March 3 - April 25, 2008 |
Call for Papers |
| May 1 - 9, 2008 |
Notification of Acceptance |
| May 30 , 2008 |
In-Depth Outline due |
| July 7, 2008 |
Draft Paper due |
| July 28, 2008 |
Final Paper due |
| August 15, 2008 |
Draft Slides due |
| August 15 - 31, 2008 |
Dry Run Practice |
| September 1 , 2008 |
Final Slides due |
| September 22 - 23, 2008 |
SNUG Boston 2008 Conference |
In-Depth Outline
To start your outline, it is recommended that you use the paper template. That way you can simply use the same document to expand on your outline as you draft your paper. Most authors write an extensive outline because they use this outline to draft their entire paper. Not sure what we're looking for? Here is a sample in-depth outline that will help us in our initial review, and help you plan the focus of your paper.
Writing Your Paper
Format
Please submit your paper in one of the following electronic formats:
- Microsoft Word
(required template)
- Postscript
- Format the first page (see required template):
- Title in Times bold 18 point font.
- Author's name in Times 16 point font.
- Author's affiliation in Times 14 point font.
- Abstract in Times 12 point font.
- Use 1-inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right).
- Identify heading using Times bold 14 point font.
- Use Times 12 point font for the body.
- Number pages on the bottom center of the page.
- Identify SNUG Boston 2008 in the lower left corner.
- Identify the title of the paper in the lower right corner.
- Label all Figures and Examples with a reference number and title.
Paper Review Process
Your paper will be reviewed by a member(s) of the SNUG Boston 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 Boston 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.
Organising Your Talk
A session has three papers and lasts two hours, which gives you 40 minutes to accomplish your task. About 30 minutes of this time is allotted for your presentation; the remainder will be used 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 30 minutes for your actual presentation. Experience tells us that most SNUG talks do well with between 15 to 20 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 (required template).
Preparing to Present
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.
Plan to rehearse several times-- alone, with your spouse or friend, with coworkers, with your boss, and with your department (and practice with a microphone whenever possible). In rehearsal, the primary task is to find out how you sound. If possible, record and play back your talk. Listen for words with fugitive sounds, that are hard to say, or difficult to comprehend, and replace them with words that come through loud and clear. Keep in mind that you are speaking to an audience. If you were a member of that audience you would appreciate a presentation that is clearly communicated to you in conversational language. Also, practice varying your speaking level and intonation. Instead of speaking in a monotone, let your voice emphasize key points. Rehearse your talk with your slides until you can practically ignore your notes. One way to reduce dependence on your script is to underline key words to recall ideas.
Remember that your talk is a combined verbal/visual presentation. Let the slides carry the message visually at points throughout your presentation, but do not completely rely on the visuals. After the audience has had time to comprehend a slide and you are elaborating on a subject, it is most effective if you do not have the competition of the projected image. Use a blank slide at those times.
Look in a mirror to observe your gestures, stance, and facial expressions. Use your hands only when you want to emphasize specific points. Pace your rate of speaking according to the familiarity of your subject. When introducing something new, slow down.
After rehearsing alone, practice in front of your associates at a formal session. Rehearsals with an audience will help you discover how listeners will react. They can tell you where to polish, where to put in another visual, and when to offer more explanation. Have someone help you time your rehearsals, and then trim or extend the material as required to keep your presentation within the time limits. Ask your rehearsal audience to think of questions that may come up. Make a list of probable questions the conference audience might ask, as this will help you during the Q&A period after your talk.
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
Cliff Cummings, of Sunburst Design, Inc., has put together a great presentation on preparing for your SNUG talk. Cliff has many years of experience presenting training material, as well as SNUG presentations. The tips he provides are very helpful.
Cliff's Presentation Tips
Dry Run Presentation
All authors should contact their local Synopsys representative to schedule a dry run of their presentation. It also helps to have dry-runs with colleagues who are both familiar, and not familiar, with your work. This should be done sometime between August 15 - 31, 2008.
If you do not know who your local representative is, please contact the SNUG Program Manager.
Poster Session
This popular session is for all authors to participate in (not just presenters). The purpose of this session is to provide one-on-one conversation among attendees and authors. It also gives attendees an opportunity to chat with the authors of presentations they were not able to attend, due to the parallel scheduling. The session layout will be rows of flipcharts. Each flipchart will have a sign attached to it indicating the paper title and authors. The flipcharts will be grouped by session. As an author, you will be standing next to the flipchart with your paper title, ready to chat with attendees.
Experience tells us that to truly benefit from this session, it's important that you put something up on your flipchart in order to entice attendees to converse with you. So, you are required to prepare a 'poster' for this session. The poster can be anything from color printouts from your actual presentation, to a real poster created specifically for this session. The content of the poster should be prepared with the purpose of creating interest to attendees for discussion. Use color, graphics, charts, etc. Bring your business cards! This is another great networking opportunity. Bring a small giveaway if you wish (sample code on a cd?).
On the Day of the Conference
At SNUG, the audience for each session is typically about 75 to 100 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 up to 100 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 lavaliere 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 Boston 2008 will enhance your professional reputation and bring credit to your company or university.
Contact Information
Please contact the SNUG Boston Team if you have any questions.
