This is my first time at ICML, and every paper here has a talk and a poster. It’s a lot of work to prepare, but one nice benefit is that because my poster had to be done before I left, the talk was also pretty much done at the same time, modulo minor tweaks. Having to be ready early means less last-minute preparations and lower-stress at the conference overall. Another plus is that some talks are probably better as posters and some posters are probably better as talks, so the two modes of presentation gives a diversity to the delivery process. Some people also prefer talks to posters or vice-versa, so that’s good for them as well. Finally, the conference has 6 parallel tracks, so knowing that there’s a poster takes some of the stress out of deciding which session to attend — you can always catch the poster if you missed the talk.

The major minus is time. Sessions run from 8:30 to 6 and then posters run from 7 to 11 PM — it’s overwhelming! You can easily spend the entire conference at talks and then at posters, resulting in a brain overload. This also leaves less time for chatting and catching up with colleagues over dinner, starting up new research ideas or continuing ongoing projects in person, and the informal communication that happens at conferences. People do make time for that, but the format less conducive to it, or so it appeared to me. I ended up taking time off a bit during the sessions to take a walk around the Olympic park and have a chat, and I saw others leaving to do some sightseeing, so perhaps I am adhering to the schedule too much.

It’s interesting how different the modes of conference/social research communication are across research disciplines. I’ve yet to go to ICASSP or ICC, and while I have been to a medical informatics conference once, I haven’t gone to a Big Science conference or the joint meetings for mathematics or statistics. I imagine the whole purpose and format of those is completely different, and it makes me wonder if the particular formats of machine learning conferences are intentional: since there is rarely an extended/journal version of the paper, the conference is the only opportunity for attendees to really buttonhole the author and ask questions about details that are missing from the paper. Perhaps maximizing author exposure is a means to an end.