Speaker Guide

Technical setup

  • The room you will use to present should be well lit, have stable internet connection, and have no distracting background noise, movement or glaring lights.
  • If you can arrange two screens, so that you use one for your presentation, and the other to view the audience, it may help get some visual feedback.
  • Make sure your microphone produces good sound quality, if not, try to find a good external microphone.
  • Ensure that the person recording the event has a screen resolution equal to or lower than 1920x1080 (otherwise Zoom will render the speaker's video stream to be tiny).
  • One day before your seminar you will be provided with a link to a testing area on our virtual conferencing platform (currently Zoom). Connect and test your video, audio, microphone, the display of your presentation, etc. Become familiar with the different screen-sharing options (share a specific screen, share particular program window, etc) to be prepared to choose the correct one.
  • The day of your seminar join the meeting at least 10 minutes before the start of your talk.
  • Don't forget to disable annotations by other participants.
  • Make sure to turn off any programs that would result in pop-up or sound notifications during your talk. This can include email software, any chat programs (Slack, Google chat, gitter, etc), VOIP software (Skype, etc), or other ones as well like Dropbox.
  • Also turn off any unncessary backgound programs (such as browser with many open tabs), as this can affect the quality of your video stream.
  • Disable smooth inter-slide transitions and slow animations in the presentation. Because of low frame rate, they work poorly.

Audience questions

  • At the beginning of the seminar the moderators will announce the format for asking questions. Visit moderator guide for further information.
  • During your seminar, you will be the only person whose microphone will be continuously streamed to the audience. In general, only moderators are allowed to mute/unmute participants, including you.
  • Attendees will notify the moderators when they have questions. The moderators will, at their discretion, unmute themselves to stop the presentation, and then unmute the audience member allowing for questions and direct interaction with you.
  • Since the moderator needs to interrupt you to allow for questions, it is generally a good idea to pause for 5-10 seconds from time to time to introduce an opportunity for the possible questions.
  • Unlike during a regular conference, you will have no option to chat informally after your talk. To compensate for that, we invite you to tell the audience how they can reach you afterwards.

Recommendations

  • In a virtual seminar it is possible to use multiple software platforms as part of your presentation.
  • To make it more dynamical and visual you can share a Jupyter/Mathematica notebook and live-show code/software that you developed.
  • On a computer setup with a touchscreen and digital pen, it is possible to do “chalk talk” style presentation. This can be either an intended part of your talk or a way to answer questions. Have the software and hardware ready to go so that it can be easily put to use when needed.

Considerations for the recording of your talk

  • Bear in mind that your talk will be recorded via the Zoom platform. You should also be aware that the participants may take screenshots/their own recordings during your talk.
  • You can review the recording and request removal of some segments before it is published on Youtube.
  • Since the recording will be published, images that were simply grabbed from the internet should not be included. We recommend to use either Google image search with the copyright filter turned on or Wikimedia Commons.

Conduct

  • Hostile, disruptive, or disrespectful behaviour is monitored by the moderators.
  • The moderators will remove participants violating professional conduct.