Marcelo has been requesting it for some time, and
Julian Togelius has already surpassed me, but I guess it's still worth the while to write something about
PPSN X, from a strictly personal point of view.
First and foremost, I enjoyed it, unlike
previous events, posters got a roomy space, refreshments were available for everybody, every poster had an assigned space so you didn't have to hustle for a slot, and the attendance was consistent, from the beginning to the end of every poster session (90 minutes each). This reinforces the idea that poster is a good format for conferences, and not the ugly duckling of them. Besides, it allows you to concentrate on whatever you're more interested in. The main problem is that it needs additional effort from the author: first, you have to put together an attractive poster that attracts customers (attendance is not guaranteed, as in sit-down poster sessions), and then, you have to design an spiel that manages to put through what everything is about in a few minutes (less than a presentation). Plus, if everything goes well, you'll have to stay for 90 solid minutes repeating stuff over and over for the grateful audience, which is a taxing work; my advice is that you take one or several of your coauthors to the presentation, so that you can take turns explaining it, or take a leave for the toilet, to get water, whatever. You should avoid empty posters.
PPSN is also original in the sense that the session chairpersons explain in a single slide the poster at the beginning of the session. It's hard work, and I know, because I have done it already 4 times. My advice for the organizers is that you shouldn't make it harder giving two sessions (30 papers to prepare in all) to each chairperson. Obviously, quality of the presentation suffers. That does not mean you should check on them before the presentation to see if your paper is represented correctly (it's hard enough as it is), but, in this occassion, some presentations were not up to par, with just a copy of the abstract being shown in the slides, or some papers actually badly explained. To be fair, this has been a part of PPSN I think has fallen behind the previous editions.
In the Q&A session at the end of the conference, one of the chairpersons requested that, in the future,
the authors themselves should prepare the slides. Well, that goes for other conferences, but we expect a lot more from PPSN, so, please, be very careful when selecting chairpersons for future PPSNs.
And this has become long enough, so I'll give my appreciations on other subjects later on. Meanwhile, you can take a look at
the pictures
Etiquetas: ppsn, conferences, posters, Dortmund
