Final Project

Poster Guidelines

Communicating clearly about your work with others is important. In addition to the draft and final reports that you will submit to me, you will also create and present a poster about your project to your peer students and other JMU faculty as well as community members. The poster showcase will be Friday, April 25.

Because good posters often require several rounds of revision, you will submit drafts of your poster along with two of the other project deliverables: the proposal and the draft deliverable. These drafts must include placeholders for anything you do not have at the time of submitting the draft (e.g., results). The final draft of the poster will be submitted the week before the poster showcase. I will offer feedback and revise your poster grade after each submission.

As you design your poster, keep in mind that the focus should be on your contributions, which should be clearly described and highlighted. Everything else should be there to help you explain your contributions during the showcase, and to ensure that someone visiting your poster later can understand it. You should prepare rehearsed 30-second and two-minute summaries of your poster, using the elements of your poster as a visual aid to your explanations.

You must submit your poster in either PPT, PPTX, or PDF (preferably PPTX) on the appropriate Canvas assignment. You must include the following items:

  1. Title and List of Team Members - Include photos if possible so that people can find you during the poster session if you're not at your poster.
  2. Background - Provide bullet points or 1-2 brief paragraphs of background information about your selected software system. Include a QR code that links to the project (and/or to your own code, if you wish to).
  3. Technologies - List the technologies that your project uses and the language(s) is it written in. Include information about how large it is, whether it is distributed, and any other aspects that are relevant to CS 470.
  4. Roadblocks - Describe any issues that you ran into while working on the project, including problems with building and running the system. How did you overcome those obstacles?
  5. Analysis - Describe the experiments that you ran and the results that you found. Summarize the architecture of the system and evaluate the scalability of the system along various dimensions. Provide any relevant results in the form of graphs, charts, tables, or text/prose. Remember that any images will be enlarged; use vector graphics wherever possible.
  6. Insights and Contributions - If applicable, describe any insights that you found (e.g., interesting tradeoffs) and any significant novel contributions you were able to make. Include experimental results, graphics, or screenshots where possible.
  7. Conclusion & Future Work - Provide a 1-2 sentence summary and then describe at least 2-3 concrete ideas that you have for extending this project in the future.

Do not try to fit everything you have onto the poster; focus on the most important points and use visual aids (images, figures, graphs, etc.) whenever possible. Your poster must be 3' x 2', clean, and readable. Here is a poster template that I recommend using. Check carefully for factual errors as well as grammar and spelling mistakes before you submit--such things are very embarrassing during a poster session!

Here are a few more general resources about creating good posters:

Your submission will be graded on its content (10 pts), formatting (5 pts), presentation (5 pts), and effort (5 pts). Some portion of the grade will be based on your attendance and presentation at the poster session (date/time on the calendar), based on feedback from the poster judges. You may receive preliminary grades in some categories based on your early submissions. After the poster session, I will assign you an overall letter grade in the four areas (content, formatting, presentation, and effort) for your poster according to the poster rubric. A summary of the different grade levels is as follows:

  • A - Exceptional: Effective poster with a clean layout, compelling and useful visuals, and concise but clear prose.
  • B - Good: Detailed poster that still needs some refinement in the layout, the visuals, or the prose.
  • C - Satisfactory: Acceptable poster that still needs some significant improvements.
  • D - Deficient: Evidence of a good-faith effort.
  • F - Unacceptable: Lack of a good-faith effort.