For conferences with large poster sessions, this page describes the general process used to assign posters and create the poster-session layout. Smaller conferences do not need to group posters by topic area because attendees can easily view every poster in a session when the number of posters is small.
This process is only a general description and not all conferences follow this process. Details for a specific conference may vary significantly.
The first step to laying out the poster sessions is to create every poster event in the website. This is usually done by importing the papers from OpenReview or some other source of paper decisions.
At this stage, each paper generates a “Poster Event” containing the title, abstract, and author list, but no time or location has been assigned yet.
After all posters have been added to the website the next step is to assign the posters to a session. Usually this is done by first taking all papers which have an oral presentation and assigning the corresponding poster for these papers to the session immediately following the session**. The remaining papers are then randomly assigned across all poster sessions. Random assignment is used to spread topics across sessions.
Spreading topics across poster sessions is important because authors often want to visit other posters in their area. If related posters appear only in the same session, authors who are presenting may not be able to visit those posters. Random assignment serves as a practical proxy for topic balancing because waiting for all papers to receive topic labels would introduce unacceptable delays in the schedule.
Conference staff define the physical layout of the poster room, identifying each poster position. From this layout, a poster-position list is created. Often this list is not in numerical order but instead is follows a serpentine layout. The length of this list determines how many posters can fit in each session and is required for enabling Self-Service Poster Session Selection.
After all papers have been assigned to sessions, the Self-Service Poster Session Selection feature is enabled.
Authors may then adjust their poster session as space allows to avoid scheduling conflicts, personal commitments, or travel constraints.
In parallel with the steps above, the website collects topic selections from authors. Authors are notified—usually multiple times—to choose their topics.
A topic-selection deadline may be listed on the Dates page, indicating when topic selections must be completed to be considered during grouping. Authors may still update their topics after the deadline, but changes made after the cutoff are not reflected in poster grouping, although they do improve search relevance on the website.
If fixed signage is used for the conference, we create an ordering of the top-level topic areas that keeps the groupings as consistent as possible across all poster sessions. A small optimization step is used to choose an ordering that minimizes how much the topic groups shift from one session to another. Poster topics receive sort keys based on this ordering. Posters are sorted by these keys and assigned sequentially to the poster-position list created earlier.
Even after poster-position assignment is complete, authors may still change their poster session. Although this may disrupt the topic groupings, the flexibility ensures that authors affected by late-breaking issues—such as travel disruptions—can still present their work.