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Comment by dangom | Hacker News Reader

Are scientific posters still a thing in all conferences you guys attend? I see many communities transitioning to "digital posters", by which they mean PPT slide decks... I sure miss traditional posters, but curious what the future holds for them.

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Yes. I was just at a cancer biology conference with thousands of posters (multiple days). This year, it was also hybrid, where posters also had to uploaded to be viewable by virtual attendees. But these were still full posters, not a slide deck. However, physical posters were still there and much more useful than a digital equivalent would be.

When walking the isles with that many posters, you’re not just looking for ones that you flagged because of the title or abstract. You’re also looking for new work, or things that catch your eye. I stopped and talked to a person who’s poster I just happened to walk by because it had the words “Shannon Entropy” on it. Turned out, I learned something because of it.

This. Being able to walk and discover new work or see a poster that draws your attention is so much more engaging than scrolling through slidedeck titles on a screen.

Yes (materials science) - my absolute favorite poster sessions are at Gordon research conference in my sub field, but the big meetings still do the arena style poster sessions, mostly with conventional printed posters

The worst is trying to have remote poster sessions though, haven’t seen one that was worthwhile yet

Yes. At NeurIPS (big AI conference) the vast majority of papers are presented as posters. Getting a paper accepted into the conference proceedings is considered a good achievement, the presentation format doesn't matter so much. Many people prefer going to the poster sessions because the spotlight talks are very short (10 mins) and there are so many attendees that it's difficult to speak to the author. (Though there was serious overcrowding last time because the poster sessions weren't staggered).

Yes still seeing them in photonics. Conference organisers are still a bit ambiguous about how to make the online compatible as many conferences run hybrid, as someone else said it typically doesn't work well, although I think it could work with some of the platforms that are available (like gather town), but typically the conferences are so entrenched with zoom that they don't really try other options.

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