It slightly depends on the convention, but on the whole, I like to see people who are interested and informed being interested and informative about their specialisms; panels on specific writers who are *not* current best sellers -- golden age writers or forgotten writers or feminist writers, say; panels on how the fiction part of sf works; and quirky things (local folklore, for instance, or how something works).

Martial arts and how they work - or not - on the written page. Myth. Doing research.

Otherwise, what la_marquise_de says.

I'm suggesting this with the caveat that I've never been to a sf/f convention, so I'm not totally sure what would work as a panel discussion. But ever since reading Easy Pickings I've been thinking about the different worlds authors have created and how those worlds are alike and/or different. I loved the "when fantasy worlds collide" moments in Easy Pickings--Jane wonders where the hell that sword came from, Joanne freaks out a bit when she learns that vampires are real. I'd be interested in hearing a panel of authors talking about their worlds as sort of a compare/contrast, and explaining why they made the choices they did in creating their world.

Sex in SFF.

Modern american myths, any sort of myths and legends really, archetypes that are present throughout cultures, realistic and/or fair representation of religions and ethnicities (why is it still okay to make villains and idiots hick southern rednecks? With or without hellfire preaching evangelical flavor? Yikes, people. I live in the South, and a great many of these people are quite intelligent, friendly, loving human beings. It's sloppy and lazy to slap an accent and an ignorant representation of a belief system on a character and have that be the villain/idiot.)

Subgenres and media - all the various -punks, mixing genres, experimental presentation of stories from novels to movies to comics and the stories that have been made into all three ;)

There are topics I could listen to all day :)

The holographic nature of reality

Could you explain what that means? :)

People go to panels?

Strangely, they sometimes do!

I was misinformed.