Travel Information for North American Symposium

For those of you attending the North American Symposium the 10th-14th October, please find travel and symposium information below:

Friday Harbor is on an island that can be reached by ferry from Anacortes, a town north of Seattle. The nearest airport is the Seattle Tacoma International Airport (SEA). There is a shuttle that goes between the airport and the Anacortes ferry terminal, which costs $68 dollars for a round trip ticket. The ferry fare is $13 roundtrip. Once you reach the island, we’ll have a volunteer drivers on hand to pick you up and take you the rest of the way to the Friday Harbor Labs.

For the symposium activities, please bring a 36″x48″ (91cm x 122cm) poster describing your research and four powerpoint slides introducing yourself to the group. (More details on these things below)

You should pack clothing for five days appropriate for light rain and temperatures between 50-70 degrees Farenheit (10-20 Celsius). Bring something nice enough to present in and something comfortable enough to explore the beaches in.

Two of our sponsors, Sandia National Labs and DSA, will be offering workshops for modeling software. If you have interest in attending, please bring a laptop with Matlab capability. If you don’t currently have Matlab on your computer, you can download a free 30 day trial of Matlab in the days leading up to the symposium. We’ll have an hour of tech support time right before the workshop to help make sure everyone who wants to participate has the technical capability to do so.

You should bring a Powerpoint presentation that is no more than four slides and under five minutes long. Think of it as an elevator talk. This should most consist of the essential parts of your research and not the technical details. Include enough information so that people doing similar work know to come find you during the poster session, where you can explain your work in detail.

36″x48″. This is where you get to go in depth about your research. This should include the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Discussion of results, Conclusions & Future Work, Acknkowledgements and Citations. There should be between three and seven captioned images, including graphs.

For those who are still at early stages in their research who don’t yet have results, this can take the form of a literature review showing either prior work done in the field or results done with similar methodology to demonstrate and validate how the proposed work will contribute to the field.

Your poster should be accessible for a range of backgrounds from Economics to Engineering.