Fifty-eight days to the opening of ISB/ASB 2019. Abstracts have been reviewed carefully, the program has been finalized, and we are ready to welcome you to Calgary for the Opening Ceremony and the Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture by Hugh Herr on Wed July 31st at 5PM. The Wartenweiler Lecture will be one of the highlights of the conference, don’t miss it.
At the end of the pre-registration period, we had over 1500 participants, suggesting that the final number of attendees will be more than 2,000. We are happy for the support and excitement, but a conference that will almost double the number of previous meetings brings its own challenges. There will be 11 parallel oral sessions, and three 2-hour poster sessions with almost 400 presenters each. We are trying hard to make this enormous stream of information and presentations digestible for all.
By now, you will have been informed if your abstract will be presented in an oral or a poster session. Please consider that 2 out of 3 abstract submissions will be presented as posters. Also, note that decisions about poster/oral were made purely based on the fit of your work with others, that means we will have oral sessions where all presentations are focused on the same topic. Oral/poster presentations were not chosen based on reviewer scores, and thus many excellent abstracts that were ranked highly were assigned to poster sessions. We will make sure that the poster sessions will be an excellent forum for presenting your work, and will receive the attention they deserve.
As you prepare for the conference, keep the following in mind: For the poster sessions, adhere strictly to the size requirements (0.9 m in width and 1.2 m in height). Detailed requirements were sent to you earlier, and are also posted on the website. Please check if you need any clarification.
For oral presentations in a regular session, you will have a time slot of 12 minutes: 8 minutes for presentation and 4 minutes for changing presenters and questions. We will be enforcing the 8 min. limit strictly, so please adhere to it in fairness to the other speakers, and in fairness to the spectators who deserve to question you about your work.
We are particularly happy to have a great number of participants from economically developing countries. We are supporting 58 students by paying for their registration and five days of full accommodation in one of the conference hotels. Furthermore, we have supported another 30+ academics from EDC countries with reduced registration. We invested more than $ 85,000 for supporting EDC participants, but even that was not enough. So, in a last effort, ISB and ASB provided another $10,000 each for supporting EDC members, which will allow is to support more than 120 EDC participants for a total of more than $ 100,000. We are grateful to the University of Calgary, Delsys Inc., the de Luca Foundation, and ISB/ASB for their support of the EDC initiative.
We are excited about the conference, and I hope so are you. Visit our webpage at https://isb2019.com and look at the fabulous keynote and invited speakers, and all the exciting awards and award winners. We are ready to host the world of biomechanics and hope that you are ready for a week of stimulating science, an exciting social program, and hopefully an excursion to the incomparable Rocky Mountains. We can’t wait to welcome you all to our beautiful city and country.
Walter Herzog (in behalf of the organizing committee)
