Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!fede
From: fede@ethz.UUCP (F. Bonzanigo)
Newsgroups: comp.org.ieee
Subject: Re: How about all-poster conferences?
Keywords: conferences, poster sessions
Message-ID: <1243@ethz.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jun 89 22:22:39 GMT
References: <55337@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: fede@bernina.UUCP (F. Bonzanigo)
Organization: ETH Zuerich, Switzerland
Lines: 47

I am very pleased that David Friedman in Article 73 of comp.org.ieee
raised again the point about the format of IEEE conferences, in
particular of ICASSP. He proposes an invited review lecture + poster
session format and I second it.  Actually this idea is not new, but is
the one used for ages in biology and physics, at least in Europe. This
means that conferences can be successfully organized this way: just ask
your friends in the physics or biology departement how they do! From
what I heard from them I can add the following rules:

* The posters are exposed not only during the poster session, but for
the whole conference if possible (this needs a lot of floor space, but
the conference needs fewer lecture rooms), or at least long time before
the official poster session. In this way one should have enough time to
look at the posters by himself, pick the ones most appropriate to his
interests, maybe read the papers, and think about good questions to be
asked. Enough time (breaks) should be allotted for this purpose.

* The poster sessions are when the author has to be present at his
poster. They are not organized by topic, but the authors of a given
subject are evenly distributed among the poster sessions. In this way
they have more chances to discuss with people with the same interests.
During the poster sessions no lectures take place.

In this way the poster sessions would cease to be the Cinderellas of the
conferences and the latter would fulfill better their purpose to forster
discussion and information exchange between researchers.

A personal note: I remember a discussion on this subject with 4 or 5 ASSP
leaders (clearly Al Oppenheim was there, maybe Russ Mersereau, I do not
remember who the others were) where I exposed how biologists and
physicists organize their conferences. It was on a train from Florence
to Milano after the 1978 Florence Conference on DSP. The IEEE 1980
L'Aquila Workshop on DSP has been basically organized in this way and
was a great success. I do not know why the half-hearthed kind of poster
sessions described by David Friedmann has been adopted afterwards both
by IEEE and EURASIP conferences.

Federico Bonzanigo
  Institut fuer Elektronik
  Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
  CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
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