Ignite Sessions

EMBC 2016 – Novel Presentation Format for Poster Sessions

One of the goals of the EMBC 2016 Conference Committee is to decrease the number of parallel sessions which had grown out of hand in recent years, and to provide a better experience for both authors and audience. For the general audience, many parallel sessions create unavoidable conflicts, and create very difficult navigation to avoid missing important work being presented to advance the attendees’ own research. For the authors, many parallel sessions thin the audience in each session and reduce the potential impact to reach larger audiences.

The solution embraced by the Conference Committee is to reduce the number of oral sessions by allocating only 30% of all accepted papers to orals. We all believe that poster sessions are more efficient to put the author in direct contact with the researcher interested in the work, but we still needed to find a way to quickly let the audience know what is the important message in each poster. Therefore, in EMBC 2016 all poster presentations will have an oral component. The conference afternoon sessions will be concentrated on posters. All posters assigned for a given day will be on display for the full day. So poster presenters scheduled for a given day will have to hang their posters in the morning between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM. Posters will be organized by themes in the poster session.

Following the afternoon keynote and Symposia sessions, there will be a new IGNITE session where poster presenters will have the opportunity to present ONE SLIDE summarizing the importance of their work for 2 minutes. Each IGNITE session will be organized by Theme and there will be between 30 ~40 presentations in each session. This will be a great opportunity for the general audience to find out which posters are of greater importance for their research. There will be virtually no overlap of other sessions with IGNITE or poster sessions.  After the IGNITE session, poster presenters will stand by their posters at the poster session (15:00-19:00) and there will be finger food in the poster hall to create and exciting and productive atmosphere of scientific interchange.

This is a novel way of organizing EMBC and in particular the poster sessions, and we will love to hear your feedback on how to improve this organization.

Ignite Presentations MUST be uploaded no later than Monday, 8th August in order to participate in their scheduled Ignite session.