AREADNE 2024 Research in Encoding And Decoding of Neural Ensembles Eliopoulos Conference Center Milos, Greece 25–29 June 2024

Contributed abstracts for poster presentation at AREADNE 2024 are solicited. Authors are encouraged to concentrate on aspects of their work that are relevant to the conference mission, namely, how multiple single neurons interact to encode brain activity, and how we might decode that ensemble activity to understand what the brain is doing. Experimental, theoretical, methods, and applied research are all encouraged. Abstracts will be judged based on relevance to the theme, scientific merit, and importance of results. AREADNE Conferences have a reputation for premiering exciting research with broad impact. Send us your best work!

The AREADNE Conferences are normally highly-oversubscribed. We therefore can offer only one registration spot per poster to the presenter of accepted posters. Submitters of abstracts that have co-first authors will need to bear this restriction in mind. Non-presenting authors are typically put on a waiting list, and only a handful are eventually offered a spot at the meeting.

Does your abstract have a figure? Before submitting your abstract, double check that all font sizes are at least 8pt as the figure is rendered in the final PDF. Please make an actual comparison between 8 pt font in the text (in a test phrase, for example) and the text in your figure as it appears in the final PDF.

Basic Formatting

Abstracts should be written in English, and are required to fit on one US letter page (8.5 x 11 inches) with 1.2 inch margins on all sides in a single-spaced, single-column format. Use of templates provided below is required. Please do not adjust any formatting setting in the templates. You may include optional Acknowledgments and References sections (in that order), but they must appear in the same font size as the main text, and must fit within the one-page limit. Please follow the style of the templates and see the sample abstract. Submissions that change the style will be required to reformat and resubmit: deadline extensions are not offered for such corrections.

Abstracts must be submitted in both PDF and either LaTeX, or DOC form. (Why both?) LibreOffice and Microsoft Word both allow exporting to PDF as a built-in feature. Please note that documents produced using Apple Inc.'s Pages software have had compatibility issues in the past, and so are discouraged; as an alternative, we recommend using freely available LibreOffice software. Please see the template files below for additional detail.

For LaTeX abstracts created with pdflatex, see
https://areadne.org/2024/AREADNE-2024-template-tex.zip.

For DOC abstracts created with either LibreOffice or Microsoft Word, see
https://areadne.org/2024/AREADNE-2024-template-doc.zip.

Both ZIP archives above contain a checklist to help avoid common formatting problems.

NOTE: If you are attempting to download these ZIP archives on an Android device, you may get a puzzling error such as "Cannot display PDF". The archives should open correctly with an app such as WinZip. If you are using MacOS and get a similar puzzling error with the extension on the downloaded file appearing to be .zip.pdf, rename the file to remove the extraneous .pdf and it should unzip without further difficulty.

Content

Abstracts should describe new, previously unpublished advances that are relevant to the theme of the meeting. Posters from accepted abstracts will be expected to describe data, analyses, simulations or conclusions that have not been presented elsewhere.

It is helpful to think of submissions as one-page papers rather than research proposals. The best-reviewed submissions historically have multiple paragraphs rather than one monolithic block of text. The goal should be to clearly and concisely present your work. Submissions that do not contain results do not generally get positive reviews.

NOTE: Please do not try to squeeze as much material as possible into the one page. Abstracts that adjust the format to that end or ignore the specifications in this Call will need to be rewritten and resubmitted in order to be considered. Deadline extensions for such rewrites will not be given.

Figures

A maximum of one figure may be included in each abstract, and must fit within the single page of the abstract and within the margins. Figures should be created at the intended size, rather than scaled down. All figure text, including axis and tick labels, legends, etc., should be no smaller than 8 pt font measured as the figure appears in the PDF. Please use a vector format for your figures whenever possible (EPS preferred), but avoid EMF and WMF as these formats are non-portable.

Figure captions should be brief, clear and describe the figures appropriately. Scaling or cropping of figures within the word processor should be avoided, as this can create compatibility issues or, often, unacceptably small text. Figures should be rendered at a minimum of 600 DPI for images, and 1200 DPI for line drawings or plots, even if they include images. EPS is the preferred figure format, as it is resolution-independent for lines and shapes when properly constructed. Avoid EMF and WMF. JPEGs are acceptable only for images without annotations, and must be encoded with at least 90% / maximum image quality. Low-resolution figures will need to be re-created at a higher resolution.

*** NOTE *** Fonts being too small in figures causes three quarters of submissions with figures to be immediately rejected for correction and re-submission. Please avoid this extra reject-resubmit cycle by thoroughly checking your figures as they appear in the PDF rendering of your abstract.

Acknowledgments

An optional Acknowledgments section may be included to mention funding agencies and programs. It should be brief, and separated by a section header with blank lines above and below. See the example abstract.

References

If references are cited in the abstract, they should appear in a separate section called References toward the end of the abstract; citations should appear numerically in square brackets within the text [1]. References should be limited to no more than four total, to be listed in order of appearance in the text.

References should be one per line, and should include an author list (three authors before et al.), year of publication, journal name, volume(number):pages, and DOI if available. Use standard abbreviations for journal names. Do not cite pre-prints, or unpublished material. If there is not enough room for your references, consider editing down the main body of your abstract. See the example abstract.

1. Flugen, Isha, Veebuck, et al. (2014) J Theor Physiol 9(4):8-33, 10.1006/jtp.2014.12

Other sections

No section headers should appear except for the optional Acknowledgments and References (in that order). Specifically, do NOT use, e.g, Introduction, Methods, Observation, Discussion, or any heading other than Acknowledgments and References.

Submission

Please submit no more than one abstract per first author. Each attendee will be able to present at most one poster.

Submissions should be sent via email to submissions@areadne.org, using AREADNE 2024 poster submission as the subject line. Attach the PDF file and the LaTeX or DOC file to a message that includes the corresponding author's name, affiliation, and email address for communication about the submission. This address does not necessarily need to be the same as the address used for publication, but must be the corresponding author's primary email address to ensure rapid, efficient communication about the submission.

Abstracts should be submitted between 8 January 2024 and 26 January 2024.

Review

A preliminary review is performed at the time of submission. Passing this preliminary review means the submission will go on to full peer-review as described immediately below. The large majority of submissions with figures require modifications to pass preliminary review. Some submissions are rejected at preliminary review, typically because of issues of scope.

Each submission that proceeds to full review will be reviewed by each member of the organizing committee, except the co-chair in charge of overseeing submitted content. Reviewers score each abstract on three criteria, conference relevance, scientific merit, and significance of results. Reviewers with a conflict of interest recuse themselves from the consideration of pertinent submissions. The three scores are combined for each submission and used to rank the set of submissions. Accept / wait-list / reject decisions are based on that ranking. Late abstracts are integrated into this process when possible, but suffer a penalty that affects decisions at the margins. For example, a late abstract is much more likely to be wait-listed than one that was on time. The number of accepted abstracts is strictly limited in order to maintain the intimacy of the meeting appropriate to the venue. Final review scores are not communicated and will not be made available.

In order to maintain objectivity of the review process, any attempt to exert influence, for example by contacting members of the organizing committee to advocate for a particular submission, will automatically trigger rejection of the submission, and may result in permanent barring from participation in AREADNE meetings. Decisions by the review committee are made in the larger context of the meeting capacity and are thus are not independent; therefore, no appeals process is available.

Problems with the templates (including not downloading)? Let us know.