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The MPIA conference series
at Ringberg Castle
 
EPoS Guide
This page summarizes guiding information about how participants can adjust to the unusual EPoS conference format, be it to, e.g., give a talk or review, to organize a focus group, or to chair a discussion.
Contributed Talk
You have 20 minutes for your talk, and the chair will enforce this limit.
Be ready for the 10 minutes of discussion after your talk. Some speakers prepare extra material for likely questions.
All participants are experts in star formation, so there is no need to introduce it again.
Not all participants work both theoretically and observationally. Include a simple description of your approach for the non-expert in the introduction.
Preceding reviews or talks may already have provided a nice introduction to your talk. In this case you can devote more of your time to the result presentation. Checking the other talks of your session is therefore recommended.
Stay mainly with the science content of your submitted abstract which was the basis for the SAC decision to give you a talk.
Consider to mention posters relevant for your topic.
It helps the discussion to summarize the progress made with your work in concise and understandable form at the end of your talk.
Before your session, check that your talk is correctly displayed by the beamer.
Review
You have 30 minutes for your review, and the chair will enforce this limit.
Be ready for the 10 minutes of discussion after your talk. Some speakers prepare extra material for likely questions.
All participants are experts in star formation, so there is no need to introduce it again.
Stay with the topic that you agreed to review when being approached by the SAC.
The following review structure is suggested:
- 5 minutes of general introduction of the session topic
- 10 minutes for the open questions
- 10 minutes of recent state-of-the-art research addressing them
- 5 minutes of summary and outlook
Avoid reviewing mainly your own work.
Checking earlier EPoS reviews might aid in assessing the progress or open questions.
You should mention relevant posters.
Reference to following talks of the session or focus groups will help the participants to overlook the topic.
Before your session, check that your review is correctly displayed by the beamer.
Focus Group Convenor
Shortly before the meeting, the Focus Groups page may hold more information.
Two convenors can suggest a meeting.
Only participants with a poster contribution can be convenor.
Discussions are the essential part of the focus group meetings. The program therefore should start with a 5-10 minutes introduction of one of the convenors, followed by a few 5-minutes-presentations and then the discussion.
Several attempts to misuse focus groups for additional talks make it unfortunately necessary that the focus groups are supervised by the organizers.
Some preparations (done by the convenors before the group) help to get the group started:
Are there enough chairs?
Consider to get all slides on one computer.
Is the beamer displaying the introduction correctly?
Display the focus group topic and program.

(Final) Discussion Moderator
Moderating a discussion at EPoS may turn out to be a challenge. Discussions can be intense, with many hands up to request speech time, and schools of thoughts colliding.
Sometimes, the audience needs a joke to relax, or a stimulation or provocation to get going after a row of talks.
The first minutes are reserved for an introduction by the moderator. The introduction should not repeat or summarize the topic and the work presented in the session in detail. Rather it should address the disagreements, open questions, doubts and perspectives.
Keeping a list of main points arising during the discussions can be helpful in assembling the introduction.
You may decide to briefly show again a key picture from the presentations, or even your own relevant research. It can be fruitful to exaggerate views.
In the discussion part, it should be displayed what question/topic is currently discussed.
Try to achieve an approximative balance in speech time between theoreticians and observers.
Devote any detailed discussion between several people going back and forth to the coffee break.
Keep your personal time plan of how much time you devote to each of the main questions and use it when the discussion dies out.
Before your moderation, check that your introduction is correctly displayed by the beamer.
Session Chair
Appear 10 minutes early and make sure that the next speakers of your session are present and that they have checked their presentations.
Get the participants back from the coffee break before the start of the session.
Inform the speakers that you will give a 5 minutes warning, announce speaker and title.
If the speaker has not finished the talk in time, rise and place yourself near the speaker to indicate that the time is over.
If the speaker does not put up the summary and finishes within a short time, end the talk.
The first two questions go to young researchers.
Throughout the discussion, try to reach an approximate balance between observer and theoretician contributions.
Detailed discussions going back and forth are postponed to the next coffee break.
Interrupt comments which turn into small talks.
End the discussion timely and thank the speaker again by applause. At the end of the session thank all speakers.
Conference Summary
An EPoS conference summary is a very difficult task.
It means to report on all essential findings/conclusions made in the posters, the talks, the reviews, the focus groups, and the discussions.
Preparational work can be done by scanning through the online abstracts and images.
The summary does not have to be chronologically, but some ordering in topics can help to focus.
Former reviews have been especially successful when the presented findings are interpreted in terms of where do we stand in this subtopic.
Even more difficult but very constructive is to catch the spirit of the conference.
An outlook on what lies ahead can be stimulating.
Jokes can help to relax the audience, allowing to lean back and have a view on the broader frame.

Scientific Advisery Committee SAC
SAC membership is by invitation. It is more work than the SOC work for a common conferences. Communication is done by email, no telecons/videocons are necessary.
You will be asked to suggest session topics as well as review speakers for each suggested topic.
In a SAC voting, topics and speakers will be selected.
The suggestions and votes should be influenced by the specific focus of the oncoming EPoS meeting.
Once the registration has been closed, you vote on oral contributions and participation. To consider excellence of science, but also to have a balance between theory and observations, as well as to some extent between young and old, gender, nationality, schools of thought etc. is the difficult part of this decision.
Usually, SAC members do not give reviews.
The organisers hope that you plan to attend the meeting when you accept the SAC membership.
Prime Talk
The topic of the prime talk is the focus of the meeting.
Prime talks last 50 minutes followed by 30 minutes discussion, and have their own session.
A good overview over the entire field, an open and critical attitude, and the ability to give a fresh and stimulating presentation are helpful for prime talks.
The prime talk can contain parts where not the science but our approach in performing it is discussed.