Project IV: Preparing a Poster

Presented posters

Instructions

A part of the course (15% of the grade) is to prepare a poster presentation for the joint poster session. The posters will be prepared either individually or in pairs on the term paper topics. The latter is recommended so that everyone has a chance to present their own and evaluate other students' posters (see below).

A poster session is your opportunity to present your paper topic to general audience in a concise way with a help of a bulleting board. Your role is to stay by your poster, explain the details and answer questions. Because everyone is doing this at the same time, you do not need to give a lecture that reaches everyone. The session is meant to be relaxed and informal.

Poster report

In addition to presenting your own poster, you are required to evaluate and write a review on other students' posters. This consists of a short (one paragraph) written statement of each of the posters (execpt one's own) and a grade. The poster reports are to be done individually, not in pairs. In your evaluation, pay attention to both the poster layout and its visual appearance and the verbal presentation.

Please give the name or names of the people who were presenting the poster to you. Give each poster also an overall grade using the scale A- (below average), A (average), and A+ (above average).

Note that this means that each student has to visit all the posters during the poster session! I strongly advice you to take notes during the session, as this will be a great help when writing the poster report. The deadline for the poster reports is Friday, 27.4. (midnight). Copies of the poster material should be submitted to the instructors after the poster session.

Poster topics

The poster topics will be the same as the term paper topics. Students working on the same topic may choose to prepare the poster together, but not in any larger groups than pairs.

Guidelines for poster presentation

The idea of poster presentation, or the term paper for that matter, is not to review the contents of a particular article, but to explain more generally what the topic is about. Your goal is to try to answer the following questions:

What is the problem addressed?
Why is this problem being addressed?
What is the general framework where the problem belongs to? What other interesting problems can be found in this framework, but are not addressed here?
What is the solution suggested in the given paper? Is the result correct/feasible? Are there other solutions?
What do the results mean, how important are they?
What questions remained unsolved? Could the suggested solution be improved?

Depending on the length of the given article, you may need to acquaint yourself with the references given in the paper and/or do literature search in the Internet. In most cases the above questions cannot be answered by reading a single article.

Some guidelines for designing the poster can be found from the following addresses:

» Henry's slides on posters
» Poster preparation guidelines in Chemistry
» SIAM guidelines for preparing posters
» U. of Michigan poster preparation guidelines for biology
» ... and many, many more from different search engines.

The size of the poster board is 118.5cm x 150cm (excluding frames), and it is gray in color. If you prepared a fullsize poster and want to print it in multiple A4s, you can use the program poster to do it. First convert your poster (ppt or odp file) into postscript format. Poster program takes the whole poster size and the postscript file as arguments, and ouputs to stdout a postscript file in which the original poster is divided into multiple A4s.




Three Concepts: Utility	2007