Call for Posters

The emphasis is on visual communication, and the intention is for attendees to be able to digest the content at their own pace, whilst also serving as a tool for the presenter to discuss and elaborate on their work. Posters are a highly accessible approach to presenting your work, and offer a platform to share your work in a more informal setting compared to talks and walk-throughs.

The conference will include a drinks and poster reception, during which presenters can discuss the content of their posters with the conference audience and answer questions. This provides an engaging way to network with conference attendees on a direct basis about your work. Presenters will also have the opportunity to deliver a single-sentence pitch advertising their poster to the conference audience prior to the reception.

Planning Your Submission

Posters should initiate conversation by delivering information in a concise visual format. Posters will be displayed throughout the conference, so should be understandable both with and without the presenter present.

Topics for posters could include:

• Promoting a successful research software project or tool
• Spotlighting a novel workflow that could help others
• Presenting research about the research software engineering community

Topics for posters have previously included:

• Reimagining Digital Accessibility: From Compliance to Collective Responsibility at King’s Digital Lab
• Bridging Bench and Code: RSEs Driving Omics
• It’s time to decarbonise digital research
• Create impactful scientific visualisations from your laptop! ( also requires access to HPC)

General Considerations

When submitting your proposal for a Poster, you should consider:

• Title: Should describe what your poster is about. (max. 20 words)
• Abstract: A brief and attention-grabbing summary of the content of your poster. (max. 250 words)
• Prerequisites: Describe the required skills or knowledge for an attendee to fully engage with your submission. (max. 150 words)
• Whether you wish to present a single-sentence poster pitch (see “At the conference”)

You will also be asked to provide:

• Author list: identifying the corresponding author
• In-person or online delivery (checklist)
• Accessibility: Please comment on how you will ensure your content is accessible. Refer to the conference’s accessibility guidance. E.g. consider the colours chosen and the shape and size of graphics and fonts?
• Mentorship: If your submission is accepted, would you like a mentor? Subject to availability.

Poster Guidelines

To make sure that all posters are as engaging and accessible as possible please follow the below guidelines when preparing your poster.

Format

Posters should be portrait A0 (841 x 1188 mm), due to poster board constraints at the venue.

Audience and Outcomes

Consider the following:

• Target Audience

  • Would your audience require any prior knowledge to understand your poster?
  • What information could you include to make your poster accessible to as wide an audience as possible?

• Core Message

  • What is the core message of your poster?

• Learning Outcomes

  • What do you expect your audience to gain/learn from viewing your poster?

Readability

• Ensure your poster’s content is accessible (see the “Guidelines for Presenters” section of the conference’s accessibility guidance). Yale Library also provides good poster-specific guidance. Key points to consider are:
  • Using suitably large and legible fonts and checking for colour choices so that the figures are understandable for people who have dyslexia or colour deficient vision is a great way to start your design process
    • Use clear, accessible fonts. Body text should ideally be in a sans-serif font (e.g. Calibri, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Arial, Verdana, Atkinson Hyperlegible).
    • Choose appropriate font sizes and spacing. Text should be readable by all attendees from a distance of around 2 metres.
  • Use an accessible colour palette that makes your content clear and easy to read for everyone.
  • All figures, tables, etc. should be annotated before being publicly released.
  • Contact Details. For this event we request the presenter(s) of any conference-related material to leave appropriate contact details within the material so that they may be sent queries by members of the audience.
  • Perform an accessibility check on your poster before you upload and print. gov.uk has guidance on this, and there also exist automated checking tools to help ensure you haven’t missed anything.

Before the Conference

Before the conference, you will be asked to upload your poster to Zenodo for digital attendees. Details on how to do this will be provided once acceptance of posters have been confirmed.

Print a full-size copy of your poster before coming to the conference and bring it with you. Whilst RSECon will provide poster boards and fixtures, as do not provide a facility for printing posters.

At the Conference

Posters will be displayed in designated areas, which will be open to all attendees for the duration of the conference. Successful applicants will be asked to meet the Poster Chair on the morning of day 1 of the conference to discuss specifics and set up the posters.

• You will need to print your poster yourself and bring it to the conference venue.
• RSECon will provide boards, hanging materials etc.

During the conference the following events will take place:

Poster Pitches

During one of the plenary sessions there will be an introduction to the poster session during which each presenter can deliver a single-sentence pitch to communicate why conference attendees should visit their poster.

Examples of pitches might be:

• “Our containerized workflow lets you test HPC code on your laptop, then deploy to supercomputers without changing a single line—no more ‘works on my machine’ excuses.”
• “We reduced a 6-hour climate simulation to 12 minutes using GPU acceleration and smart memory management—come see the techniques and benchmarks.”
• “Debugging parallel code is hell. Our visual debugger shows you race conditions as they happen across threads, turning impossible bugs into obvious fixes in real-time.”

Poster Session

There will be a dedicated Poster Session, during which each presenter is expected to be beside their poster to answer questions and discuss the work with the audience.

Judging and Prizes

Posters will be judged based on the following criteria, with prizes awarded to the highest commended.

Criteria includes:

• Presentation:

  • Creative use of artwork/images/graphs/visualisations
  • Logical flow and layout
  • Clarity, readability and accessibility
  • Clear and engaging communication during the networking session

• Novelty and contribution to the respective field

• Relevance to the conference themes

  • RSEs as part of the research journey
  • Enhancing credit and reproducibility: research software quality, performance, and evidence