17 Apr 2015

Poster Child

My team met up at the SSM Poster Session at 8am to set up our poster for early judging. Unfortunately we ended up sticking around all day (because we believed we needed to). Only one judge ever actually approached the poster and asked me questions about it, which is a bit disappointing.

Generally I would say that the experience feels like a waste of time. Most of the posters consisted of very interesting and involved research involving data science, mathematics, physics, and biology. Stick in open source contributions and it falls short. Anyone outside of CS will find it difficult to understand what we actually did and how it is of any importance. It was an interesting exercise to try and communicate this, but I’m not sure if I got our point across clearly.

It seems like the judges don’t care about CS. I know that there were specific judges for specific fields, but were there any for Computer Science? There didn’t seem to be a lot of transparency regarding judging, which could have been by design.

Perhaps we just weren’t technical enough with our approach, but it was a bit of a disheartening experience. Not that I went in with illusions of winning, I just wish there was a bit more interest.

Laura Barber at 12:43PM