CERF 2025 Oral Presentation Guidelines

Oral presentations are a central component of CERF conferences and provide participants with a valuable opportunity to share their research and network. Please read these instructions carefully to help ensure your presentation is a success. 

To maximize accessibility and impact of CERF 2025, all presentations will be available on-demand in an online library for six months after the conference. This will allow virtual attendees and anyone who missed a specific presentation to view it after the conference.

Please note that there are two steps for in-person presenters: you must upload your slide deck for your in-person presentation and record your talk for the virtual library.

What to Expect During Your In-Person Presentation 

For traditional oral talks, each presenter will be given 12 minutes to present followed by a 3-minute question and answer period. For those presenting lightning talks, two lightning talks will fit in a traditional oral talk slot; therefore, you will have 5 minutes for your presentation, followed by approximately 2 minutes for questions and answers.

Your session room laptop will have your presentation clearly viewable on the desktop. Simply double-click your presentation and control it from the podium using the computer mouse or the up/down/right/left keys on a keyboard. A PowerPoint remote/laser pointer will also be included in each room.

Roaming Audio/Visual technicians will be located in close proximity to all meeting rooms and will be available to provide assistance if required. A student worker will also be assigned to each meeting room and can help track down an AV technician.

Accessibility

We encourage all presenters to consider making your presentations accessible to all in the audience. Small changes can greatly improve the accessibility and thus, the impact, of your presentation. This website provides some great tips and links to additional resources.

Specifications

Computer Equipment
The computers in the meeting rooms will be PCs with Windows 7 or Windows 10, Office 2013 Standard, Acrobat Reader, and Apple QuickTime. Personal laptops cannot be used in the session rooms. All presentations will be uploaded from the Speaker Presentation Room (B20) to the meeting room laptops that have been provided for your use. However, support is available for any last-minute revisions to your presentation. Please see details below

Creating Your Presentation
All presentations must be created in, or converted to, Microsoft PowerPoint. AV will be prepared to present in 16:9 but if your slide aspect ratio is different (e.g. 4:3) it can be shown but will not occupy the entire screen.

Acceptable formats** for presentations: PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, or .pptx); Adobe Acrobat (.pdf).

Video & Audio Files
The recommended video format for Windows-based presentations is Windows Media (.wmv).

Image files are embedded directly into PowerPoint when the file is saved, while video and audio files are not. Only a link is made to those files. Copy your video and audio clips into the same folder as your presentation PowerPoint file. This will eliminate the problem of PowerPoint losing the link to the file. Follow this same procedure with any fonts that might not be installed on the meeting room laptops.

**Macintosh Users
Please make sure that all inserted pictures are either JPEG or PNG file-types. Quicktime (.mov) files are also an accepted video format. Presenters using Macintosh’s Keynote program should consult Apple technical documentation for directions on converting their presentation to PowerPoint. This conversion should be completed prior to transmission to a meeting room PC laptop.

Fonts
Arial and Helvetica are recommended for clarity and compatibility. Use a font size of at least 24 points for body text and 36–40 points for headings. Light colored text on a dark background is advised. Avoid using red or green. Recommended maximum number of lines in text slides is no more than 6 or 7.

Images
The size of the screen will be 1920 pixels X 1080 pixels, meaning that any image with more pixels in the X or Y coordinate that is more than that will not be displayed. The image will be altered by PowerPoint to fit. Large images (i.e. 2000 x 1500 pixels) which are created with digital cameras and scanners will make the resulting PowerPoint file very large. This may cause the presentation to load slowly. This can be avoided by inserting images with the following properties:

1. For on-screen presentations, JPEG-type images work well. This type of image file can be created with virtually all imaging programs.
2. Using a graphics program:
3. Change the size of the image to approximately 800 x 600 pixels
4. Save as file type (.jpeg).
5. Select compression setting of 8 (High quality image)
6. Insert all images into PowerPoint as (.jpeg) files. If you copy the images to the clipboard and then Edit/Paste them into PowerPoint, the images will not be compressed and the PowerPoint file can become very large. To avoid this, insert them directly into PowerPoint (Insert/Picture/from File).

Animations
Use animations only if they are absolutely necessary to convey a particular message.

Submissions Process for In-Person Presentation Files

Slide decks must be uploaded to session room computers in advance of your session. There are two ways to submit your slide deck: via the X-CD platform, or on-site in the Speaker Presentation Room.

Advance Submission
Presenters are strongly encouraged to submit presentations in advance via X-CD, no later than 30 October.  All presenters will receive an email message several weeks prior to the conference with instructions for submitting their presentations.

On-site Submission and Review/Editing
The Speaker Presentation Room (B20) will be open:

Sunday, 9 November
12:00 PM - 5:00 PM PT

Monday, 10 November
7:00 AM – 5:00 PM ET

Tuesday, 11 November
7:00 AM – 5:00 PM ET

Wednesday, 12 November
7:00 AM – 5:00 PM ET

Thursday, 13 November
7:00 AM – 3:00 PM PT

Check-in the day before your session if possible to preview your presentation and no later than 4 hours prior to the start of your session. Technicians will be on hand to help preview and/or edit your presentation as necessary.

If possible, your most current presentation should be saved on a flash drive and brought to the Speaker Presentation Room (B20) Please do not bring your personal laptop to the Speaker Presentation Room (B20) as the process of retrieving your presentation from it will be prohibitively time-consuming.

You may edit your presentation up to 4 hours prior to the session start time. When you are finished reviewing and/or making changes to your presentation, you must tell the PowerPoint technicians that you’ve viewed and approved your presentation. It will then be saved to the technician’s computer and transmitted to your meeting room laptop where it will be easily located on the desktop.

Quality Control
Giving your presentation a last “once-over” is the most important step you will take to ensure your success. When reviewing your presentation, make sure all fonts, images, and animations appear as expected and that all audio or video clips are working properly. The computers in the meeting rooms use the identical software as those in the Speaker Presentation Room (B20) therefore: IF THE PRESENTATION DOES NOT PLAY PROPERLY IN THE SPEAKER PRESENTATION ROOM (B20) IT WILL NOT PLAY PROPERLY IN THE MEETING ROOM.

Security
Cameras and video equipment are not permitted in the Speaker Presentation Room (B20) All files are automatically deleted from the meeting room laptops at the conclusion of each day.

Submission Process for Virtual Oral Presentations

You should have received a personal link to the submission platform with your abstract assignment notification email. You can also log in directly to the submission platform using the email and password you used to submit your abstract. There are two methods to record your oral presentation: record on the platform of your choice and upload the video file through your personal link, or record directly on the submission platform. If you upload an existing video file, it must be an MP4. We know that most presenters will practice their talk several times before the live presentation; we hope you can record that final practice talk for the virtual library.

If you cannot find your link to the submission platform, please check your spam folder. The email would have come from [email protected]. If you do not have the link and cannot log in, please contact Tricia Fry ([email protected])

You should have received a link to the upload site via email. Please try to keep your recording within your allotted time, either 12 minutes for a traditional talk or 5 minutes for a lightning talk. You can record this video either record directly on the platform, or self-record and upload your video. Instructions on how to upload your self-recorded talk can be found here. Instructions on how to record your talk in the system can be found here. Here are some tips and tricks, suggestions for editing closed captioning and other ways to make your presentation more accessible.

The deadline for uploading your presentation is 13 November 2025.