Instructions for Session Chairs

The current detailed agenda for the Conference may be found by going to: http://www.lanl.gov/RPSD2002/agenda.shtml. Because this agenda will still evolve somewhat, I have put a date at the top.

In general, morning sessions start at 8:30 and afternoon sessions at 1:30. If we expect 7 or 8 presentations during your session, this is when the session will start. If, however, there are only 5 or 6 presentations during your session, we have bumped back the first paper until 8:55 or 1:55. This allows us to still have all sessions break at the same time, and avoids the awkward situation of having 4 talks before the break and only 1 or 2 after. (For the Thursday afternoon session with only six talks, I did not bump things back, as I suspect that people would be just as happy to get the session started and get the session ended.)

I have tried to keep the ordering of talks within your session as you suggested. Of course, if there have been withdrawals, then there have been changes. Also, there are a few papers that I am fairly well convinced might not be given. I have taken the liberty of moving these to the end of sessions, and may do more of this if I have further concerns. Please review your session and get back to me with any corrections, questions, or suggestions.

Many of you have seen copies of the abstracts for your sessions. If any of you would like advance copies of the full papers for your session, let me know and I will send you the pdf files. You might find it helpful to read these in advance in order to facilitate introductions and discussion during your session.

When you register for the Conference at La Fonda Hotel (2nd floor mezzanine; will be open 4-8 Saturday, 8-8 Sunday, 8-5 Mon-Wed, and 8-12 Thurs) there will be a special Desk for Speakers and Session Chairs. Please make sure to check in here as well. We will have an updated set of instructions for you at that time. Included in those instructions will be an invitation to a Continental breakfast on the day you are chairing a session (time and place to be specified in instructions). We will use that opportunity to review any last-minute changes, problems, or questions. Also at check-in, you should receive a little "Session Chair" sticker to affix to your Conference Badge. As you can tell, we spare no expense to honor your contributions!!

As far as the sessions themselves, all papers are scheduled for a total of 25 minutes (including discussion). We will need you to keep things pretty close to schedule to accommodate folks who want to see various papers in different sessions. One of our worst-case scenarios is to have nobody show up to give a certain paper. We will do our best to avoid this, but if it happens in the middle of a session, we will have to ask you to simply stop the session for 25 minutes and get back on schedule with the next speaker.

There will be a variety of A/V equipment for speakers (viewgraph machines, slide projectors, and LCD projectors for people wanting to use their laptops). We hope to have a student assistant assigned to most every session to help with the equipment, and with wireless microphones that will be required in several of the rooms.

We will ask speakers at Registration to fill out a brief bio that we would make sure that you receive to help with introductions. If any of you would like e-mail addresses of your authors in advance to contact them, let me know. To make sure that there are no problems and to meet the speakers it would be helpful if you could arrive in your room ~ 20 minutes prior to the start of your session.

We are trying to do a few extra things during the week on behalf of the students who are attending (over 20 at last count). One of these extras is to provide each student speaker with a little certificate acknowledging their participation as a speaker at RPSD 2002. We plan to have each of you award` those certificates to the student immediately after he or she finishes the presentation.