CSE 160
Poster Presentation Guidelines

Your poster presentations have been assigned individual dates. Please meet with the instructor during office hours to discuss your overhead transparencies (a draft of which you should have with you) at least 7 days before the presentation . Your talk will be either 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Check with the instructor to determine whether you have a short or a long talk.

You are also required to turn in a 3-5 page html paper which coordinates with the presentation. The paper should be submitted two class sessions before the presentation . The instructor will provide feedback by the next class session and the revised paper will go on the web at the time of the presentation.

Poster presentations are team efforts. Please decide (and let the instructor know) if you would like to be graded for the paper and the presentation separately or if you would like a team grade. If more than one person worked on the paper, a team grade will be assigned to the paper. If you are splitting the talk with another student, make sure that the flow is natural and that you do not repeat material in both talks.

Your paper should describe the topic of your presentation and include relevant hyperlinks. Use the guidelines in paper guidelines to assist you.

Your presentation should include the following components. Remember, your mileage may vary depending on the topic of the presentation.

• Start with an Introduction. Describe the problem to be solved. Why is it an important problem? After you have motivated the problem, you want to very briefly describe the approach of the researchers that is the focus of your talk.

• What have other people tried to do to solve the problem? This is related work. You can find out about related work by following some of the more important bibliographic references from the papers you are reading. Related work can go several places in the talk, depending on how you structure the talk. Typical places are after the introduction or after the results.

• After you have introduced and motivated your topic, you want to get to the focus of your talk. How do your researchers solve the problem? Give a concise and clear technical summary of their approach. What is their model? What are the good points and problem areas of their solution?

• If there are results, you will want to talk about them next. Are there experiments which support the validity of the approach? Are there proofs? Give a quantitative analysis of why this is a good approach.

• At the end of the talk, provide a conclusion. Talk about open questions and future work. You may want to include a URL or other information about the topic.

• Don't make the font too small on your slides. Experiment to find a font that people can read easily from the back of the room.

• Include figures. Figures help a lot in making a talk interesting. Make sure your audience can read the font on all figures and charts.

• If you include code, make sure it's readable. It sometimes helps to highlight important parts of the code.

• You may want to make notes for yourself to look at during the talk or with certain slides. This will help you say what you need to when you need to say it.

• Don't fill up your slides with too much material. Check the WWW for examples of talks that look readable and use them as a guide.

• Practice your talk at least once (and probably more than once) to check the timing, flow, and figure out where the rough parts are. (You may or may not want to do your practice in front of an audience but you should definitely practice.)