Poster Guidelines

CIKM 2008 Poster Session Details

Poster site details

You will be allocated a poster board to display your poster. The dimensions of the board are Height 4 Feet (120cm) X Width 3 Feet (90cm). That should be big enough for any reasonable poster! Push pins will be provided. There is no need to bring a hard-back poster; an ordinary roll-up one will be easier to hang.

When to be there

This year we will have three poster sessions, one for each day of the main conference. Each day will have about 35 posters organized by area track. On each day the poster session will be held from 9:00 am. to 5:30 pm. The poster days will be: Monday (October 27, 2008); Tuesday (October 28, 2008); Wednesday (October 29, 2008). As a poster author you will receive an email notification detailing your poster session assignment.

Each day there will be a poster boaster session that will form part of the morning plenary session; here the area chairs will present a synopsis of each poster for that day. To aid with this your corresponding area chair will contact you for one slide (that contains the poster title, presenters, affiliations, CIKM Area and some salient points and graphics regarding your poster); they will provide you with a slide template.

Best Poster Award

A best poster award will be given to the authors of the best poster. The best poster will be determined as follows: Each conference participant will receive pocket money, $100 in fake money, as part of their registration package. Each poster will be assigned a "tip-jar" (an envelope), where conference participants can deposit tips, i.e., part of their pocket money. At the end of the poster day, each poster author turns in his/her tip-jar to the registration desk. The author must insure that the money is counted and the total entered on the envelope; envelopes with no totals will be assign a total of zero. The five posters with the most "tips" will be considered for the best poster award. One will be selected by the best poster committee as the best poster. The best poster award will be presented during the closing ceremony of the main conference.

Location

Vintners Ballroom, Marriott Hotel (Conference Hotel).

Set up

On the day of your poster please setup your poster by 9:00 am; the poster area will be open from 8:00 am onwards.

Tear down

Please take down your posters after 5:30 pm.

Who to contact with questions

A student assistant will be available in the poster room. They should be easily identifiable by the CIKM 2008 t-shirt that they all wear. For more complex issues, email info__at__cikm2008.org and cikm2008pc-chairs__AT__soe.ucsc.edu with the following subject "CIKM 2008: Posters Questions".

Poster printing

If you would like to get your poster printed locally in order to avoid lugging it halfway around the world with you, the best option is (20-30 minutes walk from conference hotel):

FedEx Kinko's FedEx Kinko's Office & Print Center
Kinkos
702 Lincoln Ave
Napa, CA 94558
Phone: (707) 226-7722
Fax: (707) 226-7708
E-mail: usa5493@fedexkinkos.com

Some tips on creating a great poster session

  1. Emphasize graphics over text. The idea of a poster session is to talk, so you'll get to use plenty of words! When you're talking, you can refer to the graphics on the poster that help to tell the story. If you write a lot of words on your poster, it is quite likely that you will be the only one who will ever read them!
  2. Include a simple message that can be seen at a distance. You want the right people to come see your poster, and the key to making that happening is good advertising. This might be a catchy title in a large font, a graphical flow that tells the basics of your story at a glance, or a bit of each.
  3. Print the poster as a single large sheet, not as a set of ordinary-sized pages. This will give you much better control over layout, which should make it possible to tell your story more clearly. If you stick to black and white, printing large sheets can be fairly inexpensive these days. And you can avoid lugging a large poster on the plane with you by sending it to the Kinkos near the conference and having it printed there.
  4. Posters are about the discussion that happens around them, so its important that someone be there throughout the session to talk with people about your work. You'll probably want to recruit a backup presenter so that you'll have a chance to walk around and see some other posters while your backup stands in for you. If nobody else from your group will be there, you might still walk around a bit without losing (much of) your audience if you ask one of your neighbors to come and get you if someone stops by. Or at the very least leave a note saying when you'll be back.
  5. Consider bringing something you can hand to people with whom you particularly want to remain in touch with. Perhaps a few copies of papers you have written on similar subjects. Or a stack of business cards. Anything with your email address on it should do.
  6. Before the session starts, walk around and note the location of any posters on topics that are related to yours. Then when people visit your poster, you can offer referrals to other posters that they might also be interested in seeing. If everyone does this, it should help generate more of the right kind of traffic -- people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say.
  7. Have fun!
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