Project Postervideo Instructions
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CS224n: Project Poster/Video Instructions
Last updated on March 13, 2019
Each team (both default and custom) makes one poster or one video, which
is worth 3% of your grade. This document gives instructions for making your
poster or video – it applies to both default and custom projects. You should
already know whether your team making a poster or video (see Piazza post).
1 Content of your poster/video
The requirements for the poster/video are much the same as in other project
classes, or at research conference poster sessions. The purpose of a poster/video
is to give the viewer (who you assume is not familiar with your work or perhaps
even the general area of your work) a quick and easy-to-understand overview of
your work, highlighting only the most important and interesting details. Usually
this means you want to cover something like the following content (though of
course you can devise your own structure):
•Problem: Briefly explain what problem you are tackling, why it’s impor-
tant, and what the existing approaches are (you might also mention the
limitations of these approaches).
•Data/Task: Briefly explain (or better, give examples of) the data and/or
task.
•Approach: Describe your main methods/techniques/models. Diagrams
are generally better than text, and equations should be used sparingly (if
at all). Highlight the core idea of your techniques.
•Results: Present your most important results. Tables containing many
numbers are overwhelming. Be selective and choose just the results that
convey the story you’re telling. Make it clear what the evaluation metrics
are, and what’s being compared.
•Analysis: Show any plots, diagrams, examples and visualizations to pro-
vide interesting analysis. Make it clear what the reader should conclude
from each figure.
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•Conclusions: Briefly draw some main conclusions from your work. If
you wish, you can outline future work.
•References: Posters typically have just a few references (e.g. 1-3), just
for the papers that are core to the work.
Whether you’re making a poster or a video, aim to make all these sections
visual rather than text-heavy,clean and minimal rather than cluttered,
and intuitive rather than complicated.
2 Poster-specific instructions
At the poster session you will be supplied with a posterboard (width 30 inches,
height 20 inches), an easel, and push pins. Your poster will look best if you print
it on one large sheet of paper (locations on or near campus include Staples,
FedEx, CopyFactory, and Lathrop), but if you assemble your poster out of
smaller sheets that’s OK too.
Here is some advice for making good scientific posters.1
3 Video-specific instructions
Your video should be a 3-5 minute overview of your work, covering the content
described in Section 1. You could think of it as similar to a ‘lightning talk’ given
at a research conference.
The recommended and easiest way to make your video is to make some
slides, and then to record a screencast (i.e. you record the screen and record
yourself talking – your face doesn’t appear). There’s lots of free software to do
this2– search online for ‘screencast’. You can make a fancier video if you like,
but a screencast is perfectly sufficient.
For examples, you can see last year’s videos.3
4 Grading
Posters/videos will be graded based on the strength of the project, and the
quality of the presentation.
If you show your poster at the poster session, it will be graded in-person by
a staff member (who may also ask you questions about your work). If you make
a video, it will be played on a screen at the poster session, and will be graded
by a staff member.
1https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys596/fa2013/Lectures/
ScientificPosterTips_FA12.pdf
2For example, this is simple and easy to use:
https://screencast-o-matic.com/screen-recorder
3https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfnBPN7hdzPmpvkMYiZhR8UpDqZRnyiB2
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Your grader won’t necessarily be your mentor (if you have one). Posters/videos
should be easily understandable by people who are not familiar with your work,
so this is a good opportunity to show your work to a different staff member.
5 Submission instructions
•If your team is submitting a poster, please upload the poster as a PDF to
Project poster/video on Gradescope (in addition to bringing it to the
poster session).
•If your team is submitting a video, please upload the video to YouTube
(the video can be unlisted if you like) and upload a placeholder PDF to
Project poster/video on Gradescope. The placeholder PDF should just
contain the URL to your video.
For both posters and videos, it’s important that you upload to Gradescope
so that we can enter your grade. Please upload to Gradescope before
4:30pm on Wednesday March 20. You cannot apply late days to the
poster/video. Make sure to tag all of your team members – only tagged team
members will receive credit.
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