Conferences
Why present at a conference?
Conferences are one of the main ways that scientists disseminate their work. When researchers submit to a conference, they usually submit a poster or paper which is peer reviewed. If accepted, the submitter is invited to attend a conference (usually for a fee) and present the work.
While conference presentations are great because they go on your CV as either a presentation or a publication, conferences are especially useful for meeting people. There is no better way to make connections to other researchers in your field. They're also a lot of fun!
Which conferences do we usually attend?
There are many! We tend to attend conferences that are in our areas of interest, though not necessarily conferences that are specific to neuroscience. For instance, some of the conferences that we have attended (e.g. CHI) are well-outside of Neuroscience, but useful because it exposed us to a larger diversity of collaborators. Some of the conferences that we have frequented the last few years are:
Human Brain Mapping
Neurobiology of Language
Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS)
The Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS)
The Neuro Information Systems Retreat
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
How to give a talk
The most effective academic presentations often follow the spirit of the "10-20-30 Rule", as described by Guy Kawasaki. These presentations are so-called because they are:
Have no more than 10 slides
Are no more than 20 minutes long
Have at least thirty-point font
I say "modified" because it is often unrealistic to do some of these things in the amount of time and given and under academic expectations. A good rule of thumb is that an excellent academic talk:
Tells a story
Emphasises two or three key points
Makes great use of visualizations
Makes minimal use of text
Uses a roadmap
Posters
Posters are a form of conference presentation in which your results are on a poster (somewhere between 3x4 and 4x8 feet in size) which you stand beside, and you give a ~5 minute "spiel" to anyone who comes by and is interested in hearing more. Posters are a somewhat weird format because on the one hand, you should be there explaining it - so the content should be largely visual and support your words - but on the other hand you may not always be there (and often you provide a takeaway hard copy (8.5x11) or PDF, so the poster needs to have enough words and content that someone can understand it without your verbal explanation.
When the lab is presenting multiple posters at the same conference, there is value in sharing a consistent graphical style and colour scheme. We normally have a poster template around if you ask senior lab members, though it evolves over time.
Here are two great resources on developing a scientific poster:
How Much time Does it Take to Make a Poster?
This is really important. In the Science article linked above, they asked academics "How much time and planning do you usually dedicate to preparing a poster?" - and the answers are generally quantified in weeks. Just because a poster is a single page doesn't mean that a good one can be put together quickly. In fact, in many. ways it's harder to create an effective presentation in this format because you need to be very selective about how you use the limited space. You can expect to go through several rounds of drafts and revisions.
Contents of a Poster
The title bar of your poster should contain:
Poster title exactly as it appeared in your original submission
List of authors
Affiliations of each author, including Department name, university name, city, province, country
Email address of first/corresponding author (this could alternatively be in the bottom right are of the poster, along with your QR code - see below)
Logo of each university that authors are affiliated with (top right corner of poster)
A copy of your final poster should be saved on the NCIL server, in the project folder for your study.
Sharing copies of your poster at the conference
It's pretty standard to provide a copy of the poster. Many people still print 8.5x11" hard copies, but these are often hard to read since the poster is made to be much larger. I prefer to provide a PDF copy. (You can also do both). The best way to do this is:
Export a copy of your poster from PowerPoint or Keynote (or whatever) to PDF
Check the file size of this. 1-2 Mb is OK, but if it's 20 MB you should reduce the file size.
Put the poster someone sensible on the NCIL server (e.g., in a "Documents" subfolder of the project folder, and ideally within there, in a folder specifically for this conference)
Log on to NCILNAS via web browser. Navigate to the PDF of your poster. Right-click on the PDF and select "Share" (bottom option) from the pop-up menu
You may want to select a "validity period" so that after a certain date (say, a month or two after the conference), the sharing link is no longer active.
Click "get QR code"
Right-click on the QR code and select "copy image", then paste the image into your poster in Powerpoint.
Note that the PDF will not have the QR code since you exported the PDF prior to making the QR code. This isn't really a problem since people need the QR code to get the PDF in the first place, however.
Confirm, using your phone camera, that scanning the QR code does link to the poster PDF
It's also pretty common to provide a blank piece of paper next to your poster for people to write emails on, if they want you to send a copy instead of scanning the QR.
Conference papers
Some conferences (usually in computer science or engineering) require papers to be submitted which are archived in the conference proceedings. In most of the computer science subfields, for example, academic conference proceedings are often the most prestigious and highest impact venues. The Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference proceedings, for example, had an impact factor (IF) of 42.3 in 2021, which is just below Science (IF: 47.7) and just above Cell (IF: 41.8).
Clearly, certain conferences are desirable venues for our publications. Should you present at a conference with published proceedings papers, be sure to consider the venue as if you would any other publication.
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