By LOUISE S. DURHAM
EXPLORER Correspondent

Denver Sessions Promise E-ventful Poster Innovations

Online Presentations Scheduled for Annual Meeting

The new AAPG Interactive E-Poster technical sessions will be held June 4-6 during the annual meeting, in Exhibit Hall C of Denver's Colorado Convention Center.

The Monday-Tuesday sessions are morning-afternoon events; the final Wednesday presentations will be in the morning only.

It's a common occurrence: There are two presentations on your "gotta hear" list at a professional meeting - both scheduled in the same time slot.

Take heart. If the Interactive E-Poster (iEP) sessions at the upcoming AAPG annual meeting in Denver are the harbinger of the future, this kind of dilemma may soon be a thing of the past.

The iEP setup is a natural progression of the relatively recent digitization of, well, so darned much in the meetings arena.

It took a few years, but PowerPoint has now become a popular tool-of-choice in a presentation milieu long dominated by 35 mm slides. And it's not so long ago that professional associations began burning CDs containing abstracts or, in some instances, extended abstracts that meeting attendees could have for themselves to take home and view on a PC.

The iEP arena takes a giant step forward from electronic abstracts to allow full-blown presentations to be seen and heard not just at a scheduled time, but to be viewed online at anytime during an event - at the convenience of the attendee.

The Denver iEP sessions are the brainchild of Andy Pulham, research associate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado and a current AAPG Distinguished Lecturer, and Randi Martinsen, senior lecturer and research scientist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming.

Martinsen also is the technical sessions chairperson for the Denver meeting.

"The idea of the interactive sessions is, there's been a big advance in presenting in digital formats," Pulham said, "and we wanted to create another opportunity to do that."

Flexibility

This is how it will work in Denver: The presentation area will resemble a large-scale exhibitor's booth with a large screen and seating for 50-60 people - a broader audience than a regular poster session and a more intimate setting than the typical big-room venue of oral presentations.

Adjacent to this setup will be an area with a minimum of six computer terminals, each surrounded by three or four seats.

The scheduled live iEP presentations will be computer projection-based, and all contributions will be in Portable Document Format (PDF). The papers can be viewed online at the terminals throughout the duration of the meeting. Attendees can access the papers alone, with colleagues or even perhaps one-on-one with the author.

There can be no downloads, so security for the papers is not an issue.

The online version of the presentation could include far more than the live talk. For instance, a speaker might present a regional overview of Caspian Sea hydrocarbon potential and show a couple of seismic lines. Online at the terminal, there may be 20 or more seismic lines.

Authors also might provide the opportunity for viewers to look through such things as field outcrops, as well.

"The digital world gives opportunities to both authors and attendees to get more value out of the science brought to the meeting than they get now," Pulham emphasized.

Consider, for instance, that an author typically has about 20 minutes to deliver an oral presentation. There often is a subset community within the audience with a particular interest in the subject matter.

Taking the iEP route, the author can bring in, say, a 200-page document to share with that select group.

The flexibility allowed with iEP extends still further.

Say, for example, a presenter wants to show a movie in a presentation, or use a particular piece of software for something specific. The software can be changed because the schedule is not as tight as an oral session.

Pulham predicts some of the planned presentations will include movies as well as GIS data.

He said there will be a minimum of 30 and maybe as many as 100 papers available for viewing online. Thirty-two of the online papers will be presented live.

Mass Appeal

If you think this is a medium only for computer sophisticates, you're in for a nice surprise.

For starters, Martinsen emphasized it's not all that difficult or pricey to get a presentation into PDF. "It's all Windows-driven, and it just takes a little patience.

"The Acrobat software used to read PDF files is free, and it's easy to utilize," she added. "And while it takes a different software to construct the files, it's not particularly expensive."

Onsite at the desktop terminals, the setup "will work like the easiest Web site in the world," according to Pulham.

"There's no typing," he said. "You just click the mouse."

Nevertheless, he, Martinsen and a host of students will be available should assistance be needed.

The opportunities afforded by iEPs are generating excitement among the authors involved in the Denver event.

"It's going to allow us to present not only to a large audience but have one-on-one time with interested folks afterward," said Mark Gregg, president of Kiwi Energy, who co-authored a paper that is on the iEP schedule. "I think it combines the best of both worlds between regular oral presentations and poster sessions.

"It's kind of a neat hybrid."

Will iEP sessions eventually reign supreme as the de rigueur format for meeting presentations?

Martinsen thinks they are definitely the wave of the future, but predicted there will always be a place for regular poster sessions and oral presentations, as well.

What is even more intriguing is the possibility that maybe in a couple or years, such online sessions can be put in some type of medium to actually carry home, after a few problems - such as the authors' comfort zone - can be resolved, Pulham noted.