Abstract

Poster presentations are a key part of academic conferences, and sometimes, a poster session is the only opportunity we get at presenting our papers. It is thus very important to take full advantage of this opportunity and design a poster that not only attracts people’s attention, but also supports an engaging and memorable presentation. However, I have seen my share of low-effort posters (e.g., just copy-pasting texts and tables from the paper) that don’t do justice to the great and exciting research work that they are supposed to represent. As someone passionate (and judgmental) about graphic design, this hurts my heart (and my eyes…). So, in this tutorial, I hope to i) convince you that designing good posters matters, and ii) provide you with various tools and methods to design better posters. I also have stories to share, so I promise it’s going to be fun!

Bio

Yu Lu Liu is a 2nd year PhD student supervised by Prof. Ziang Xiao. Her research interests sit at the intersection between NLP and Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on NLP evaluation and responsible AI issues that arise from NLP technologies: how do people actually use NLP systems and how can we bring NLP evaluation closer to that? However, the part of her that is most relevant to this tutorial is that she took graphic design for 3 years in high-school, and that she’s pretty good at giving constructive feedback (read: she likes to complain about things).