Poster and Demo Guidelines

If you are presenting a poster or giving a demonstration at SIGIR 2007, please read the following information.

Poster site details

Posters will be allocated a poster board to display your poster. The poster boards we will use are rather big, 1.45m height x 1.18m width. We recommend A0 posters. 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.

Demos will each have one table, two chairs, two power outlets for Type C (Europlug) or Type F (Schuko) plugs (bring a converter if needed!), and an Ethernet line with DHCP. Wireless networking is also available; instructions for using the wireless network will be provided to all conference attendees. We recommend not to count on the wireless network, though! Demo presenters are provided with a poster board behind their demo table.

When & Where

The poster session takes place at the conference hotel, in the "Wintertuin", on Tuesday evening, 17.45 - 21.00. We start preparations at 15.30, so come by and check to see if you can hang your poster some time after that.

Who to contact?

Student volunteers will be available in the poster room. They should be easily identifiable by the SIGIR 2007 T-shirt.

Poster printing

You can avoid lugging a large poster on the plane with you by sending it to the Fedex/Kinkos Amsterdam, and having it printed there. Notice however that their office is not "around the corner" of the venue.

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 you 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.
4. Posters are about the discussion that happens around them, so its important that someone be there throught 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 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 that 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!