The Schedule

The idea of a BIRS workshop is to allow the exchange of the latest and most important information in your field and to allow people the time to discuss and brainstorm together in an inspiring and stress-free setting. We leave the detailed structure of your meeting up to you. However, we wish to encourage the scheduling of some unstructured time and discourage the notion that every participant should be invited to speak.

It is very useful for BIRS and for the participants of your workshop if at least some of the scheduling for talks and other activities is determined in advance. This is particularly true of the first day.

Workshop schedules must be entered by setting up an account, and logging in here:

https://workshops.birs.ca/register

Use this interface to keep your workshop schedule up-to-date. When you are ready, click the “Publish this schedule” switch at the bottom of the schedule page. Your schedule will appear on your workshop’s web page, so that the workshop participants can see it.

Lectures that you schedule will be used by the automated video recording system to add titles to the recordings, and to automatically publish videos with correct attribution. Only schedule items with a name selected from the drop-down list of confirmed participants will be "seen" by the automated video system.

Workshops run Monday through Friday. Friday programming can be difficult since some of your group will have to leave on Friday morning if they have flights out of Calgary before mid-afternoon. It is best not to schedule any activities on Friday afternoon and to keep the morning session flexible with perhaps problem sessions or something informal.

Video Recording

BIRS now has a fully automated lecture recording system in it's main lecture room, TCPL 201, and would like to record as many talks as possible. However, since half workshops share the facilities with a second half workshop, the automated recording system can only be used by one group at a time. In the interests of fairness, half workshops will spend either mornings or afternoons in TCPL 201, and will otherwise be in TCPL 202. Please keep this in mind when creating your schedule, since only talks taking place in TCPL 201 will have the option of recording.

Please see the Automated Video Production page for an overview of how to use the system and how it works, and the the announcement from the BIRS Scientific Director concerning the recording and live streaming of lectures.

Accommodations, "Getting to BIRS" and local information are available under Resources for Participants.