And the AU Speakers Are...

Over the last six weeks, a large team within Autodesk reviewed the 1452 AU sessions submitted from 718 potential presenters. This team, together with votes from over 2200 customers, selected the 640 sessions that will be offered at AU.

Over the last few days, my colleague June Nakatani and I had the fun job of informing almost 400 presenters that one or more of their submissions were accepted. At the same time, we also had the unpleasant duty of telling over 300 presenters that we were not able to include their submissions in the AU 2008 program.

In some cases, we received a multitude of submissions for the same topic, and this made it especially hard to select the best session with the best presenter. To help us make a decision, we looked at the voting results from the survey to see if one session resonates better than others with folks who would actually attend. Next, we looked at information from past AUs that we have on the presenter and then checked with industry experts on the merit of each topic.

There was lots of back and forth between my team and the different industry groups to come to the final session catalog for AU 2008. Because of the large number of GREAT submissions, we ended up with 640 sessions, rather than the 570 we were planning to have.

In the most recent AU Quarterly Newsletter, we highlight some of the sessions that the AU community voted in. The entire AU session catalog will be posted to AU Online in late July. I plan to post a draft of the catalog to the BLAUG as soon as we are all done with scheduling and editing.

Almost 1/5 of this year's presenters will be from outside the US. We will have:

• 11 from Australia
• 25 from Canada
• 4 from Germany
• 5 from New Zealand
• 7 from the UK

 …and one or more from Brazil, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, Singapore and Switzerland.

I am very happy with the quality of the submissions we received this year, and am very excited with the great diversity of speakers signed up for AU. This will be the ninth AU that I am closely involved with, and I truly believe that this will be the best ever. Lots more to come over the next few weeks as the program develops. Stay tuned...

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