¶ Creating A Gather Town Poster Session
A Gather Town Poster Session is a set of Gather Town Rooms, automatically built from templates, which contain posters presented by several authors at a given time. Conference attendees can virtually walk around the Gather Town Room and visit with the authors and other attendees.
The process for creating a poster session involves several steps.
- A set of papers is selected for a poster session by the organizer(s). It is recommended that this is done on CMT or OpenReview.
- The set of papers is loaded into the conference database.
- The number of poster rooms must be decided with unique names, each must be created in the conference database.
- The poster room URL needs to be added to the schedule and or paper pages as appropriate.
- Each poster must be assigned to a poster room. Currently there are templates which support rooms with a maximum of 28 or 40 posters. If you have more than that you will need to create multiple rooms.
- Each author of a selected paper creates and uploads a poster and a thumbnail image into the conference database.
- The poster rooms and their associated poster images are auto-uploaded to Gather Town as long as the "Auto Upload" box on the Change Gather town room page is checked.
The first five steps is up to the organizers of the poster session. The sixth step is usually performed by paper authors but may be completed by the organizer. The last step is performed by the Event Hosts conference support team, done repeatedly throughout the conference.
Your GatherTown space is usually updated hourly. It's recommended that you visit your rooms several times during setup to check that they look as you expect.
¶ Organizer Admin
The Organizer Admin page is used throughout the Poster Session organizing process that follows. Note that only Workshop Organizers and other Organizing Committee staff have access to these pages. If this link doesn't work the list of links for the different conferences is:
- neurips.cc Organizer Admin
- icml.cc Organizer Admin
- iclr.cc Organizer Admin
- mlsys.org Organizer Admin
- aistats.org Organizer Admin
¶ Loading papers into the conference database
The best way to load the papers into the conference database is to select the papers using either CMT or Open Review. After you've reviewed and selected the papers in either CMT or Open Review you can import the papers directly into the conference database by using the import from papers cmt or openreview wizard.
Papers can also individually be added by clicking the +Add button for Events on the Organizer Admin page. Fill out the paper Name and Abstract. Click the "+Add another Workshop Data" and make the Workshop event type be "Workshop Poster" (actually any string containing "Poster" will work). Under the Event Speakers section add the email for each of the Authors of this paper. The SortKey field of the Event Speakers identifies the order in which the speakers will be shown. After all the paper information is added click the SAVE button.
Creating a Poster Room
To create a poster room for Gather Town go to the Organizer Admin and click on the +Add button for "Gather town rooms". On the Add page fill in a unique name for the room and select a template for the room. In order to keep the names unique it's a good idea to include the workshop nickname in your room name. Click on the Template Descriptions section to see the templates available. Use one of the poster-room templates, select poster-room-with-titles if you are unsure what template you would like. The template can be changed later so don't worry that you need to get it correct initially. Click the Auto Upload box to make changes to the room be automatically uploaded to Gather Town during the periodic upload sessions.
No need to fill in the Gather Town Poster Links at this time. We'll do those later.
Click SAVE to save the room into the database.
See also Creating a Gather Town Room for making custom rooms. If you create a custom room then the rest of this article no longer applies and you will need to upload to posters into the room manually.
¶ Add the Poster Room URL into the Workshop Schdule
After the poster room has been created and uploaded to Gather Town get the URL for your poster room by clicking on the Gather town rooms link in the Organizer Admin page. Find the room and copy the URL for that room. Paste this URL into your schedule for the Poster Session.
Note: The URL for the rooms will change once things have been finalized with Gather Town. The domain of the URL changes fairly late in the schedule. Check back a week or so before the conference starts to make sure the URL in your schedule is correct.
¶ Adding Multiple Posters to Gather Town Rooms
There are two ways to add posters to a Gather Town room. This section describes how to add many posters at once to a Gather Town Room. The next section describes how to add, delete or move individual posters to a room.
Posters can be bulk added to a Gather Town room on the Poster Events page under the Gather section of the Organizer Admin page. Go to this page, check the boxes of the poster events you'd like to add to a Gather Town room and then in the Action drop down select "Add selected posters to a Gather Town Room". Here is how your page should look once you've done this:
Then click the Go button next to the selected Action "Add selected posters to a Gather Town Room". On the next page select the Gather Town Room and click "Add To Room".
¶ Adding, Changing or Deleting Individual Posters to Gather Town Rooms
You can add, change, or remove individual posters in a Gather Town Room by going to the Organizer Admin page and clicking on the Gather town rooms link and then clicking on the Gather Town Room you wish to edit the posters for. Here is an example of this page:
To add a poster click on the Search icon at the bottom of the list of Gather Town Poster Links. This will bring up a search dialog where you can search for the paper by title. You must press Save at the bottom or top of the page after searching to save the change to the room.
To delete a poster click the "DELETE?" box to the right of the poster you wish to delete. You must press Save at the bottom or top of the page after searching to save the change to the room.
To reorder the posters drag the box under the SORT column on the left side of the poster. You must press Save at the bottom or top of the page after searching to save the change to the room.
¶ Compact the Posters In A Space After Deleting or Moving
If you've deleted or moved posters around between rooms or in a room you may want to remove any gaps that have come up in the room. You can remove gaps by going to Organizer Admin page and clicking on the Gather town rooms link. Check the box next to the room that you wish to eliminate the gaps for and then in the Actions drop down menu select "Compact poster locations to start at zero and be contiguous". Click Go. This will eliminate any gaps in the poster inside the room.
¶ Get Your Authors to Upload Their Poster and Thumbnail Images
Authors must upload the poster and thumbnails images to one of
- neurips.cc Poster Upload
- icml.cc Poster Upload
- iclr.cc Poster Upload
- mlsys.org Poster Upload
- aistats.org Poster Upload
¶ Muli-Room Poster Sessions
To link together multiple poster rooms into a single session do the steps above for each room in the session and then link the rooms together with a hyper room as desribed in Multiple Room Poster Sessions with Hyper-Room Templates
¶ Fixing Problems in a GatherTown Poster Session
¶ Child Index doesn't fit in grid
While there are some safeguards to help prevent this it is possible to end up with too many posters assigned to a room or even just that the indices of the poster events have exceeded what is allowed for a space. This may be associated with an error message such as "Child Index 40 doesn't fit in grid 10 by 4" or similar. To fix this problem first make sure you only have as many events assigned to the room as will fit. If you have too many events go the Poster Events page in the Organizer Admin. Delete enough events from the Gather Town space so that they will all fit in the space. Then go to the Gather Town Rooms page, click the box to the left of the Gather Town room with the issue and then in the Action drop-down menu select "Compact poster locations to start at zero and be contiguous" (see image below). Click Go. The problem should now be resolved.
¶ My GatherTown Space is Black or Not Updating
It may be that a template based Gather Town space is not updating (custom spaces are not updated automatically). The first thing to check is that the Auto Upload box is checked for your space. Find the Gather Town room and click on the name of the room to go to the change page for a space. Make sure the Auto Upload box is checked and click Save. Also check that the space has a valid template on this page. It will take approximately an hour for your space to upload to GatherTown if you are within a few weeks of the conference. Prior to a few weeks before the conference auto uploading is not supported, contact the Eventhosts team to get very early GatherTown spaces.