The following is some guidance for people who are presenting at ICSE 2025 including at any of its co-located conferences or workshops. There is also some guidance for session chairs below.
Modality of presentation
Presentation should ideally be live and in person. If you have issues with travel (visa, medical etc.), please read our page about virtual attendance, and contact your track chair and/or session chair to make arrangements at the earliest possible opportunity. They will provide you with a web page to declare that you have to be virtual for legitimate reasons.
You are asked to, if at all possible, upload your Powerpoint (.pptx) or .pdf presentation in advance. Around April 16th authors and session chairs were sent an email describing how to do this. If you did not receive that email, then please contact your track chair or session chair; the problem might stem from an email mismatch between your conference registration and your paper. New emails will be sent out if and when the data is fixed, although it will be a lot of work to correct the data, so some people may have to rely on their session chair, or using their own laptop.
Uploaded Powerpoint files should be self-contained, embedding all fonts, audio and video. All the rooms have good sound systems so sound and video in .pptx files should play as expected. If you want to verify that the presentation will play as expected, then come to the Ready Room well before your technician and ask a technician to help you verify that your .pptx is suitable.
We suggest you upload early. You can also re-upload if you make changes. Your session chair can upload on your behalf if you prefer, or if you are not given access to upload yourself. If you want you can use Ready Room 209 to upload at the conference from a memory stick.
During the conference, uploaded presentations will appear in sequence in the conference meeting rooms, so there should be no delay in transition between presentations.
We will not prevent you from connecting your own laptop using an HDMI cable and presenting in that way instead. You will of course need to do this if you are doing a demo, or if you are using specialized presentation software. However if you do this, you should connect to the room’s Zoom session and share your screen (but stay muted) so anyone who is virtual can see your presentation. Connecting with an HDMI cable has risks; some dongles can be flaky for example. Even if you intend to present using your own computer, please upload a backup pdf or pptx anyway.
Timing
The start time and length of your presentation is shown in the online program.
In the main conference, most presenters have 15 minute slots. When presenting in a 15-minute, slot you should aim to only take about 10 minutes. Session chairs are asked to warn you at about 11 minutes and cut you off no later than 12.5 minutes so there are at least two minutes for questions. Any subsequent presenter should come to the front of the room no later than about about 14 minutes so the transition is rapid and smooth. Subsequent presenters should not wait to be invited to the front.
If your session is a different length, then adjust proportionately. So for example, for a 7 minute presentation, aim to talk for about 4-5 minutes, leaving 1-2, minutes for questions. You always need to stop answering queestions a little before your end time, so the next speaker can be introduced and start on time.
If there are delays due to technical reasons, then the presentation with those difficulties will have to be shortened.
Session chair role
The most important roles of a session chair are:
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To contact the presenters in advance to ensure they know that you are the chair, you will be introducing them, and you can help them solve any problems
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To help presenters if they need help with uploading their paper to the AV system in advance, or actually doing their presentation
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To introduce speakers, and ensure they start and stop their presentation on time (see the instructions above regarding timing).
We do ask that timing of each presentation (Start and end time) be adhered to strictly due for the following reasons:
a) Some people have several presentations in different rooms and may have to enter or exit a session to present (or watch) a presentation in another room. It turns out that some presenters have up to 6 presentations, and may have up to 12 co-authors! This meant that scheduling the papers in coherent sessions was extremely difficult, and there remain a few conflicts where people have only 15 minutes to get from one room to another.
b) Some people may have to present virtually, as mentioned above, and will expect to connect at a specific time.
Additional information about uploading of presentations:
Some people have papers in many tracks and so will be interacting with different session chairs.
We will be asking people who have to be virtual to present live, but to upload a video as an emergency backup.
People will be able to re-upload material right up to a few minutes before their presentation, so there should be no problem with them editing their slides if they have new ideas.
Tech Assistance
In each room, there will be a student volunteer who can help with (or seek help with) any technical issues. There will also be some floating AV techncians, especially in the largest rooms (see below). There may also be a student volunteer helping with the Zoom broadcast.