In addition to presenting at numerous seminars through the years, I was responsible for preparing and executing a seminar series.
Computer Graphics
A personal highlight was the technical training program for graphics. This consisted of three day in-depth technical seminars. These typically included a day of combined sales/technical training and two days of in-depth technical information. We delivered these sessions in the US, Europe and the Far East. We were asked by the people who attended these sessions to provide further training, and ultimately delivered three rounds of seminars.
Developing these seminars proved to be some of the most intense learning sessions I have ever experienced. For me, the highlight occurred during the second series of seminars in Germany where, two hours into a highly technical topic, one of the engineers asked "aren't you missing a term in the illumination equation?" As a matter of fact, I was... The highlight was that the people were following the material, understanding it, learning, and applying the information!
The graphics sessions are the richest training sessions I've delivered. Much more common are one or two hour or half-day sessions.
HPTC Partner Seminars
This program delivered 1/2 day technical seminars to a targeted customer base. The seminars were part of a larger program focusing on the automotive industry. The seminars were done in conjunction with partners such as Fluent (a leading Computational Fluid Dynamics vendor) and Platform Computing (LSF system management software).
The seminars were jointly prepared and promoted. Promotion included a brochure that was mailed out, email blasts, Web postings and personal invitations from each of the participating companies. We succeeded in getting 20-50 engineers and managers to attend each of the seminars.
Biotechnology Road Show
This series of half day seminars focused on biotechnology was delivered in 6 cities. It addressed key applications for genomics, and the high performance systems needed to support the applications. Several specific requirements of the biotech applications were addressed, such as storage and integer comparisons rather than floating point computation.