Short Talks:
Please send an abstract for your talk to bjaye3@gatech.edu by March 17th.
Everyone will have 10 minutes allocated to give their talk, with a further 5 minutes for a few questions and speaker change over. You do not have to use all of the allocated time, but we think it is likely that you will (it is surprising how quickly 10 minutes goes by). You are welcome to either present your talk with slides on a computer, or you can give a whiteboard talk. If you are giving a talk with slides, please send your slides to bjaye3@gatech.edu in advance so I can have everything ready to go on the day (I will send a reminder about this closer to the time).
Tips on the talk:
Don’t assume your audience is familiar with your research area: There are participants at this conference who have done research in many different areas of mathematics. You won't be speaking to experts on the problem you have worked on, or the area of your research. It is therefore an excellent idea to take a good amount of your time and introduce the area and problem at a relaxed pace.
Giving 10 minute talks is not easy, you might find that you need much more time to be able to convey everything you would like to convey. A rule of thumb is not to try and say everything -- some things will get left out and that's very much OK. In our experience, we tend to only be able to give a general overview of the area, some motivation for the work, and say a little about main results.
If you are doing a slide presentation it is a good idea to not 'over-stack' your slides -- people tend to avoid reading slides with too much information on them.
It’s a really good idea to rehearse your talk to check the timing — if it’s over 12 minutes then you probably should streamline it a bit. If it is under 7 minutes, then you have an opportunity to give a bit more introduction.
There are no strict rules that work for every talk! If the advice does not feel intuitive to you, and goes against what you want to do, then ignore it and give the talk you would like to give!
Finally....
The conference will be very relaxed, so please have fun presenting! We are very grateful that you have signed up! In particular, you do not need to worry at all about the kind of questions you might get asked -- it’s not a test. We really like being asked questions about our work, and the best questions we get are the ones we do not know the answer to — when we get asked such questions we just respond with some variant of “That’s a good question! I don’t know the answer!” (To be honest we also use this response if it is just a confusing question and our efforts to clarify it have failed.)