IPDPS 2024 PhD Forum

IPDPS 2024 PhD Forum Chair & Vice-chair
Sanmukh Kuppannagari, Case Western Reserve University, USA
Tanwi Malick, Argonne National Laboratory, USA

Student Mentoring Program for 2024

The annual IPDPS PhD Forum event will continue with the traditional poster presentations by students working toward a PhD in broadly defined areas related to parallel and distributed processing. In addition, continuing the program initiated in 2014, there will be a broader, enhanced program to include several evening and lunch-time sessions to provide the student participants coaching in scientific writing and presentation skills.

Participating students will have the opportunity to both present their research work and interact with senior academic and industry people in an informal setting. In addition, there will be mentoring sessions to help students improve communication skills, obtain valuable information for career planning, get familiar with a few of the trendy research topics, and make valuable contacts – all while enjoying the IPDPS main conference and many associated workshops. The program culminates with a poster presentation, where students have the opportunity to practice what they learned and disseminate their work to the broader IPDPS audience.

The Student Research Program will be scheduled so that the participating students can follow all the main scientific and social events of the conference, and it is open to all students, including the authors of papers presented at the conference.  

List of PhD Forum Candidates and their Projects

• Download PDF
• PhD Forum Posters on display all day Tuesday & Wednesday
• Student presenters available during all breaks (except Lunch) on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss their posters with the attendees.

Information for PhD Forum Poster Presenters

The conference area for display of posters will be available Monday evening. All posters should be on display by 9:30 AM on Tuesday, May 28th. The posters should be 32x40 inches (or 80x100cm) – see below. Student presenters are warmly encouraged to prepare professional rolled up posters, in contrast with a mosaic of small slides to post. The poster should preferably be printed with a high-quality device. The location for hanging the poster will be numbered using your PhD poster number in the program. Push pins or tape will be provided for mounting your poster. See poster guidelines at end of this page.

Planned Program                    

The virtual session on poster preparation will be conducted online before the conference starts and will discuss best practices on preparing a poster. This will enable students to be intentional about the design and content choices while preparing their posters for the conference.

The session on poster pitching will train the candidates in producing a 1-2 minute elevator pitch for their poster as well as their research in general. The students will work in groups to discuss their pitches and polish them using feedback from others. 

Panel on research and career planning will include representatives from academia, research laboratories (non-industry), and industry. After a brief description from each about what their job entails and why you might consider it, attendees are open to ask any questions to help guide what decision is the right one for them. While this is career focused, other topics, such as lifestyle and side effects of the career choices on their personal life are welcomed. 
The session on writing and communication best practices will discuss recommendations for preparing and giving technical presentations and provide an overview of how to write a technical paper. 

Poster Guidelines

Some basic guidelines on how to organize your poster include:                                             

• Relax, posters are intended to engage an interested person in conversation and then support that conversation.
• Posters should be no larger than an A0 paper size (841 x 1189 mm or 33.1 x 46.8 in). If it is horizontally structured, please still fit within the portrait dimensions specified (33.1 x 46.8 in max).
• Be sure the title and organizational affiliations are clear along the top.
• Consider the normal left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order for English when organizing the contents. Multiple columns are perfectly acceptable
• Include a QR code to a website that includes the poster abstract and an electronic copy of the poster itself.
• If there are existing publications by the poster authors on the topic, these should be the only references.
• Balance the amount of graphics and text. A visitor should be able to get the high level view within 1 minute and decide if they want to engage you.
• Graphics should show structure and general measurements that illustrate the results.
• Text should explain things without large paragraphs explaining.
• Text should be large enough to easily read at 6 feet (2 meters) distance.
• Assume the viewer is somewhat to generally knowledgeable about the topic eliminating the need for long motivational passages.
• Provide sufficient motivational material to show at a glance the poster authors understand potential impact.
• Compensation for color blindness is important. Design for monochrome, but add color to highlight.

Questions?

Write to phdforum@ipdps.org and put PhD Forum in the subject