The Future of Poster Sessions

At RSS this year, the "poster" session consisted of forty or fifty 40-inch monitors mounted at poster height; each presenter hooked his or her laptop up to a screen, and attendees wandered among the posters as usual. It's a pretty different modality! Anyone who's been to an "expo" (where exhibitors bring whatever they can afford to get people's attention) has seen big screens used for demos, but this is quite different. Over lunch, we talked about how that would change the poster session, and the best way to use a medium-size screen when people are wandering past and you want them to know about your research. After lunch, I attended the session – which, not too surprisingly, consisted of a lot of people trying different things, many of which were terrible ideas.*

So WTF is a poster session?

At a conference for some field – like robotics – people submit papers about their recent work, which are either accepted or rejected. Some of the papers are accepted as posters, which the authors print out beforehand. All the posters go up on walls and rolling corkboards in a big room, and instead of giving a talk, the poster authors stand by their poster for a session, usually ~4 hours. Everyone else wanders from poster to poster, asking questions, getting the 30-second spiel, and hopefully absorbing the research.

The goal of a poster session is to convey your research to as many people as possible. People need to come up to your poster and listen to what you have to say. If people are stacked three-deep around you, they need to be able to get something from what you're saying. So with that in mind, the Pangeek saw and will comment on the following:

  • Using the monitor as a static poster. Displaying and talking about a single image for four hours. Basically an electronic version of what you'd do anyway. It's fine, but misses a chance to do things better.

  • Making changes during the session. People moving windows around, fixing typos, adjusting image sizes... while people were standing there waiting to hear about their work. Guys! Wait until there aren't people watching the back of your head while you type!

  • Having a looping lecture. This shuts out people who wander in halfway through, as people always do, Murphy's Law being the fickle bastard it is. Someone said to me at one point, "Well, it's... hang on, when it comes back around, I can explain." Posters aren't talks. People come and go, people ask questions mid-stream. Flexibility is key.

  • Having a fixed title across the top. People wandering past know what a poster is about and whether to stop. People looking for specific work can find it. This is Good.

  • Having some large-font, unchanging text giving an overview of the work – the most important high-level points, motivation, etc. Same reasoning as above: casual drive-bys can get something from it.

  • Having a video or animated image on loop. This has three advantages. First, it can really help. If pictures are worth a thousand words, good animations are worth** a thousand pictures. Second, people are barely removed from birds. Attention is easily caught and held by shiny moving pictures of robots or whatever. Third, you can make things like result graphs bigger by cycling them, instead of cramming them all in. (But beware conflict with item 3!)

  • Using single-click interactions. Some presenters made visual changes as needed (like bringing up a video to show a particular capability and then closing it again) without being infuriating. How? By switching back and forth with a single mouse click, rather than closing things, typing something, enlarging a window, etc. Good job.

Overall? It was cool. It's blindingly obvious (in retrospect) that this is The Future; we need to figure out how to make it work for us. Also, woo! The Future! (Also also: the Pangeek wants the future to be higher resolution.)

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* It should be noted that this was completely new for most of us; the people who (arguably) mis-used the technology were the people who were trying to use the technology. Good for them.
** well, composed of