Welcome from the Con. Gen Chair
What is a "Poster"?
Window on the World
Issue 1
What is a "Poster"?
By Wolfgang Emmerich and David Rosenblum
Teenagers have them in their bedrooms, the media industry makes loads of bucks (or quid on the British Isles) using them for ads, but yet posters are the underdog media in the academic Software Engineering community. In previous ICSEs they have been presented in short talks — as some sort of wannabe paper — but we actually never saw an academic poster on a wall in Berlin, Kyoto or Los Angeles.
In this year's poster track we have set out to change this. There will not be any scheduled poster talks but the posters will rather be displayed in the Atrium, the very centre of the ICSE conference venue; you will be able to engage with this year's posters during coffee breaks and while you move between technical sessions.
Posters and paper presentations are very different forms of communication. We are very pleased this year to have 14 posters that show novel and innovative contributions from many different strands of Software Engineering. They were accepted as posters because they contain interesting ideas that are at an early stage of their development and may therefore benefit from exposure to a wider audience. Also many of the poster authors are PhD students and young researchers, who deserve our guidance and help.
We thought for a long time how this guidance could be channeled, given that verbal discussions about a poster between audience and author are not always possible. Wolfgang's former officemate, Stephen Morris, came up with an interesting suggestion. Stephen had been working as a city planner in London for a long time before he started his Computer Science career. He explained a method they used for channeling citizen response on proposed developments to the planning authorities. In England, local councils display plans and suggestions as posters in public places and every citizen is invited to review them and comment on them. Recently, Post-itnotes were used by the public to attach comments to the plans. These notes were then evaluated and taken into account during further planning. We thought this was a brilliant idea and the organization committee agreed to check it out in the ICSE 2000 Poster Track.
Every poster on display will therefore have a little pocket containing Post-it notes. We invite you to use those Post-it, write down your name and any question or comment that you may have about a poster and then stick the Post-it at an appropriate place onto the poster. Poster authors will respond during the course of the conference to your questions or comments. They will take the notes home, which we hope will help them to further the research ideas they presented on the poster. In this spirit, Merry Posting!
Designer
and Webmistress
Caroline Kehoe