New Security Paradigms Workshop

Organization and How to Prepare for your Presentation

These items are detailed below but presented here for clarity.

You must attend and participate for the entire workshop. No email, IM, or phone calls are allowed during presentations.
The workshop is highly interactive and encourages constructive participation and feedback.
Prepare for a 20 minute presentation.
Pithy presentation materials are encouraged (keep it simple). A transparency projector and a laptop projector will be provided.
Proceedings are published after the workshop. Remember: you should revise your paper with workshop feedback.

Workshop Goals and Format

In order to increase scientific knowledge and practice in the field, we encourage "half-baked," contrarian, risky, or radical concepts that might not be appropriate for other venues. You can expect a large amount of feedback in a non-threatening and constructive workshop environment. These interactions allow you to improve the quality of your paper in a unique way. Also, the relaxed environment facilitates the free exchange of ideas between both new and established researchers.

We do all that we can to make sure that NSPW is a genuine workshop and not merely a conference in miniature. After the program committee chooses the most stimulating and innovative papers available, we then bring together a small group of creative and enthusiastic individuals with diverse backgrounds and experience. Next we establish a constructive tone that rewards risk-taking and favors interactive brainstorming over lecturing presentations. Finally, the proceedings are not published until after the papers have been revised to incorporate feedback from the workshop.

NSPW traditionally has an explicit "psychological contract," introduced and discussed before the first paper is presented. Workshop participants are tasked with recognizing the strengths as well as the weaknesses of each presentation. We have this "psychological contract" to encourage risk taking in the presentations and to facilitate constructive feedback and discussion in the face of controversial topics. In the past this "psychological contract" and the process it enables have proven to be extremely fulfilling.

Presentations

Presentations are highly interactive; you should expect to be interrupted for questions, comments, and suggestions. Without such interruption, your presentation should take no longer than 20 minutes. The duration of the time slot (usually 45 to 60 minutes) will be consumed by discussion. Historically, the most successful presentations were those those that were tailored to the interactive workshop format. We are very serious about this - if you bring 30 slides, you won't get to half of them (this is the major mistake that most new NSPW presenters make). Some of our more experienced presenters put their key points on their first few slides.

An overhead projector and a laptop projector will be available at the workshop venue. If you are using a laptop for your presentation, bring a backup copy of your presentation on a reliable medium such as CD or USB flash drive.

In support of the interactive nature of the workshop, you should focus your presentation on substance and discussion, instead of style. Handwritten transparencies are perfectly acceptable. In the past we have had some Powerpoint presentations that were virtually unreadable. Therefore, we provide the following suggestions.

White text on a solid, dark background is much more readable when viewed on a projector than dark text on a white background.
What looks good on your laptop display may look bad when viewed on a large screen. We recommend that you view your presentation on a projector before attending.
Font sizes that are readable at arm's length often are impossible to read at 15 meters. Remember that the presenter in the front of the room does not have to read their slides, the people at the back of the room have to.
Multi-colored backgrounds (or background pictures) often result in unreadable text.
Animation is almost always unnecessary and a usually distraction.
Keep it simple. Don't display paragraphs; people do not want to spend undue time reading your slides. Rather, they want to hear your presentation and engage in discussion.

Attendance

As an attendee you must be present for the entire duration of the workshop. Because interaction and feedback are part of the true workshop nature of NSPW, your presentation is only a small part of your participation. We consider it unfair to other presenters for you to violate your committment and not attend the full workshop, because all presenters deserve the full feedback of the entire audience.

Attendance means not only being present, but participating. Presenters are expecting your full attention. Email, Instant Messaging, IRC, and the telephone must not be used during presentations. (We are serious about this). Ignoring this rule is rude and a disservice to everyone. There will be breaks throughout the day during which you can take care of your other business. Be sure to let people know that you will not be reachable for most of the day.