An impromptu poster competition

22 September 2009

Conference participants at the ATLAS Physics Workshop of the Americas view and evaluate posters


Poster sessions have long been a staple of physics conferences, giving the younger generation a chance to present their work. But at the recent ATLAS Physics Workshop of the Americas, the session had a competitive twist – the conference organisers made it a competition. The thirty presenters were evaluated by the conference participants, including those presenting posters, on content and poster layout.

The session was held on the morning of the conference’s last day, August 5th, with no conflicting presentations. Tall windows provided natural light as students and young researchers set their posters up on easels, along the white walls.

The conference attendees walked among the presenters, who stood near their easels, learning about the research and ranking the posters on ballots provided by organiser Al Goshaw. Al says that with the contest aspect, conference participants “had an incentive to look at the posters and an opportunity to express their opinion on which ones were very good.”

“The posters were excellent from the physics point of view, solid, precise and with the right level of details. They were also very nicely organised and structured, most of them decorated with beautiful graphs, pictures and drawings,” says ATLAS Spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, who attended the session. “Very enjoyable also from the aesthetical viewpoint. The care and the passion of the young scientists preparing them were evident.”

The ballots were taken and considered along with the organisers’ evaluations; they formed an impromptu panel of judges. Al stresses that the winners were all close calls. “It was just a very outstanding presentation of the breadth of work that’s going on in ATLAS.”

Jennifer Hsu of Yale University won the title “Best Overall” with her work on the Higgs decay channel to Z­Z-bar. Al calls it: “best poster ranking among equals, in most senses,” as the competition was very even. “It really was inspiring to see the quality of these posters,” he says.

Denver Whittington and Yi Yang, of Indiana University, earned “Best Scientific Content” for their poster on reconstructing boosted top decays, and Imai Jen-La Plante of the University of Chicago won “Best Presentation” for work on missing transverse energy in the W to electron, neutrino, and jet decay channel. All winners received a copy of the ATLAS book, and Jennifer also won a bottle of champagne.

Al is making sure that these presentations can go farther than the conference room. “I’m collecting together the PDF files for the posters and plan to get them posted,” he said in an interview September 11th. These are already online, poster descriptions and a list of links to PDFs. Below, you can view a small version of Jennifer’s winning poster.


The winning poster, by Jennifer Hsu of Yale University

 

Katie McAlpine

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