Submitting Your Panel Proposal

(based on the HFES Lecture Proposal Guidelines)

Description

A panel involves informal discussion on a topic, yet must be structured to offer a high degree of interaction between the panelists and the audience. A panel provides a unique opportunity for the dynamic exchange of views among panelists and members of the audience on a topic of common interest. A panel is not a series of papers as in a lecture session or an invited symposium.

We discourage panels in which a majority of the participants come from a single organization. Panel proposals may be submitted by an organizer who does not intend to serve as session chair and appoints a chair for the panel, or the organizer can also serve as the session chair. The panel organizer or chair should not also be a panelist in the session. The organizer of the panel serves as the contact between the Workshop chair and individual panelists. The panel organizer is responsible for submitting the proposal, selecting a panel chair, notifying panelists of acceptance or rejection, obtaining letters of agreement to appear from each accepted panelist, and providing panelists with copies of the panel abstracts and overview summary.

Presentation Length

One 90-minute session consisting of not more than six panelists, each of whom should speak 10-15 minutes (depending on the number of panelists and the desired level of interactivity), followed by an open discussion period of at least 30 minutes. The panel chair is expected to prepare questions to stimulate audience participation.

Materials to Submit

For a panel submission, the organizer should (a) prepare a 150-word panel abstract, (b) prepare a summary of no more than 500 words, and (c) invite each panelist to submit a 150-word abstract describing what he or she will discuss. The organizer's summary, together with the panelists' abstracts, will make up the discussion panel summary, and should be no longer than 1400 words (not including titles, panelists’ names, and panelists’ affiliations).

The 150-word panel abstract and 1400-word panel summary must be formatted according to the following guidelines:

  1. Your proposal must not exceed five formatted pages.
  2. Your proposal should be formatted to fit U.S. 8.5 x 11-inch paper. The text should be single-spaced in single-column format with 1-inch margins (top, bottom, sides).
  3. To ensure optimum readability, the type size for your abstract and main text must be at least 11 point and at least 9 point for references. We recommend using the Times type family (e.g., Times New Roman). Left text alignment is preferred, but justified alignment also may be used.
  4. The panel proposal must include (in order): a title for the panel, the name/affiliation of the panel organizer, the panel abstract, the panel summary, and then each panelist’s abstract.
  5. Titles for the overall panel and for each panelist’s abstract should be bold-faced and centered. Author names and affiliations should be in plain text and centered below each title. The panel organizer should place his or her name and affiliation below the title of the panel at the top of the first page of the submission. Panelist names and affiliations should be placed below the title of his or her individual panel.
  6. If references are cited in the text, these citations must contain the author’s surname and the year of publication (e.g., Smith, 2005). References should be listed in a separate section at the end of the text. References should be listed alphabetically by the surname of the first author, and hanging indentations are preferred. 
  7. Please do not use footnotes. Text-related notes should be incorporated into the main body of the text.
  8. Tables and figures may be inserted within the text near where they are first mentioned or in a group at the end of the proposal. Please number tables and figures consecutively in Arabic numerals (e.g., Table 1; Figure 3). Table and figure titles should be bold-faced and centered; table titles should be placed above the table, and figure titles should be placed below the figure. Text and titles for tables and figures must be at least 9 point type.
  9. Line drawings, graphs, photos, and other graphics used in figures must be at least 200 dpi resolution after they have been resized to fit in the document. For information about image resolution, go to http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/resolution/a/increasingres.htm. Graphics must be embedded within the file. A simple test will tell you whether the graphics are embedded – print your submission from a computer other than the one on which it was created. If the graphics do not print, they are not embedded.
  10. Please send your proposal submissions as either Microsoft Word documents or as PDF documents (PDFs are preferred). If you have problems sending your submission, please send an email to meta-info@aptima.com or contact the Workshop Chair.
  11. You will be sent a confirmation email when your proposal submission has been received. If you do not receive a confirmation email within 24 hours of your proposal submission, please contact the Workshop Chair; however, please allow 24 hours to receive this email before contacting the Workshop Chair.

Where to Submit

Please submit all panel proposals electronically to meta-info@aptima.com by 5:00 PM EDT on June 7, 2007. Authors who do not have web access should contact the Workshop Chair for details on submitting your abstracts.

If any of your contact information changes during the review process, be sure to let the Workshop organizers know as soon as possible by emailing meta-info@aptima.com and providing your new information. The Workshop organizers are not responsible in the event communication about your proposal fails to reach you because of incorrect contact information in our records.