Seminar 12: Poster Task Exercise | Continuing Tasks and Support
Goal: Introduction to a Poster exercise and continuous support, addressing queries, clarifying doubts, and refining the implementation.
This week’s poster exercise will function as a “mini-conference”: visiting PhD students will bring along some research posters, and you will circulate just as they would at the final poster session, using the course’s official grading rubric to evaluate each display. Besides sharpening your eye for layout, clarity, and technical depth, this session offers a live demonstration of what to expect in professional conference poster halls.
Additionally, feel free to bring drafts of your own posters — both the PhD visitors and your peers will be on hand to offer constructive feedback that you can incorporate before the course’s final poster showcase.
Grading Sheet and Evaluation Questions:
Each poster can earn up to 5 points, broken down as follows (see here):
| Criterion | Max Points | Score Given | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity and Visual Appeal | 1.5 | ||
| Content Relevance | 1.5 | ||
| Depth of Analysis and Creativity | 1.0 | ||
| Collaboration | 1.0 | ||
| Total | 5.0 |
Evaluation Questions:
Clarity and Visual Appeal (1.5 points)
- Is the main message of the poster easy to identify?
- Are the visual elements (diagrams, charts, layout) clear, organized, and helpful?
- Is the text concise and readable (good font size, minimal clutter)?
- Did the design make the poster pleasant to look at and easy to follow?
Suggested Scale:
- 1.5 = Excellent clarity and highly engaging visuals
- 1.0 = Good clarity with minor visual issues
- 0.5 = Hard to follow or too cluttered
- 0.0 = Very unclear or messy
Content Relevance (1.5 points)
- Are the distributed systems concepts well chosen for the problem?
- Is the problem clearly described and linked to the concepts?
- Is there a system model or diagram that shows how the concepts solve the problem?
- Do the ideas stay focused on distributed systems, avoiding unrelated details?
Suggested Scale:
- 1.5 = Concepts perfectly match and solve the problem
- 1.0 = Concepts mostly relevant, but some missing links
- 0.5 = Vague or poorly chosen concepts
- 0.0 = Concepts are not relevant or missing
Depth of Analysis and Creativity (1.0 point)
- Did the team think deeply about the challenges and trade-offs?
- Did they show originality in applying distributed system techniques?
- Did they discuss scalability, reliability, performance, or fault tolerance?
- Are there interesting insights that go beyond basic explanations?
Suggested Scale:
- 1.0 = Very insightful and creative; deep analysis
- 0.7 = Some analysis and creativity; some insight
- 0.4 = Surface-level thinking; little originality
- 0.0 = No analysis or creativity
Collaboration (1.0 point)
- Does it seem like all team members contributed fairly?
- Is the poster coherent (similar writing style, no disconnected parts)?
- Is there evidence of constructive feedback and teamwork?
Suggested Scale:
- 1.0 = Strong evidence of collaboration
- 0.7 = Minor issues but overall collaborated well
- 0.4 = Signs of poor collaboration
- 0.0 = Very poorly collaborated
In this session, apart from familiarizing yourself with the Poster task, you should also focus on refining your project implementation. This week is all about finishing the pending tasks, cleaning up your codebase and addressing any questions or challenges you might be facing in the previous phases of the project.
Additionally, in this session, we encourage you to align your efforts and prepare for the upcoming Checkpoint #3 evaluation next week. The guidelines for the evaluation can be found here: Session 12. Familiarize yourself with the evaluation criteria to ensure your project meets the required standards.