Information for delegates

Information that may be useful during the conference.

Venue

  • Location: the conference will be located in the Aston Webb and Bramall buildings, University of Birmingham.
  • Registration: from 08:30 to 09:30 on Monday 3rd September in the Great Hall Foyer, accessed by the Main Entrance on the venue map.
  • For late arrivals there will be someone at the registration desk at all times throughout the conference.
  • Conference welcome and keynotes will be in the Elgar Concert Hall from 09:30.
  • Cloakrooms: available for coats, bags, suitcases and laptop charging. There will be a volunteer in these rooms at all times.

Accommodation

  • Chamberlain Hall, 37 Church Road, Birmingham, B15 3AS
  • Check-in is is available until 10pm at Chamberlain Hall. After 10pm check-in is available at Shackleton Hall, next to Chamberlain. The same arrangements apply if arriving on Sunday.
  • A walking map showing the route from the station and conference venue to Chamberlain Hall.

Shuttle Buses

Shuttle buses will be provided between the Great Hall and Chamberlain Halls at the following times:

  • Monday 3rd, shuttle service between 16:30 and 18:30
  • Monday 3rd, Chamberlain Halls to Great Hall at 18:30 and 18:45
  • Monday 3rd, Great Hall to Chamberlain Halls between 22:30 and 23:30
  • Tuesday 4th, Chamberlain Halls to Great Hall at 08:00, 08:20 and 08:40

Laptop/device charging

Please bring your devices fully charged and also a power pack if you have it.  There are no charging points in the Elgar Concert Hall, which will be the location of all keynote talks, and limited charging points in the workshop rooms. We would advise you to save power during the keynotes in the mornings in order to conserve power for the workshops later in the day.

Charging points are available in the cloakrooms: G31 on Monday, Beale Room on Tuesday.

Workshop setup

The software environment required for most hands-on workshops is contained within the conference VM, on the conference USB stick, which requires VirtualBox. The conference VM is quite large and could take up to 15 minutes to import. To ensure that your laptop is fully prepared for workshops, please take the following steps:

Before the conference:

  1. Make sure you have 16.5GB of free space on your laptop to use for the workshops
  2. Instal VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads, v5.2.12 or later is recommended.
  3. Optionally, import into VirtualBox (File → Import Appliance) the conference VM available here [.ova].

If you aren’t able to download the VM before the conference ensure you’ve gone through steps 1 and 2 above then:

  • Import the VM into VirtualBox (File → Import Appliance) using the .ova file supplied on the the USB stick you received at the registration desk.

We strongly recommend that you begin this process as soon as you receive the USB stick rather than waiting for your workshop.

The conference USB is formatted with the exfat filesystem which is supported by default on windows and macOS but needs manual installation on Linux distributions. The packages to install are exfat–utils and fuse–exfat (or exfat-fuse on Ubuntu).

Lunches and conference dinner

  • If you have ordered vegan or have let us know about other dietary requirements please make yourself known to the staff at the buffet at lunchtime and they will see that you have the correct meals.
  • For those who are attending the Microsoft-sponsored dinner, there will be a drinks reception in the Great Hall Foyer at 19:00 where wine and soft drinks will be served.
  • There will be a bar open in the Great Hall serving other drinks from 19:00 which will accept both cards and cash.

Recordings

All non-keynote talks (i.e. standard talks and lightning talks) will be recorded but recordings will only be made publicly available with the speaker’s consent.

Audience members have not been asked to give consent to be recorded so Q&A at the end of talks will be removed before any recordings are disseminated.