Compstat 2000

Competition for the Best Presented Poster
prize donated by the ASC

Background

Following our involvement in the 1998 Compstat conference in Bristol, the ASC committee offered to fund a prize to encourage participants presenting material through posters to give more attention to the design and presentation aspects of their work. The motivation and criteria behind this proposal are discussed on the main Poster Report page.

Criteria

The posters were judged on the quality of their design and their effectiveness at communicating their message. The nature or quality of the substantive content of the poster was not considered as a factor.

The prize for this competition was £100 in cash, and the choice of any publication from the ASC list.

The Poster Competition

There were some 50 posters presented at Compstat, in two sessions. The judges were:

Andrew Westlake, representing the ASC

Gianfranco Galmacci, representing the European Regional Section of IASC

Jelke Bethlehem, representing the Compstat local organisers

Some presenters had clearly thought about design, but these are the minority. This is in contrast with some other disciplines, where considerable care is paid to the production of most of the posters.

The judges viewed the posters independently, and then came together to reach a decision about the prize. For each judge the modal category for posters was 'poor'. Most of these were no more than written papers displayed on a panel. For the remainder of this group, the only concession to the poster format was to double the font size used. Some posters had been designed on a large format using a graphics program, and while these may look more attractive, this is not enough to ensure good content, as many were still too dense to communicate clearly. Overall there is still a lot to be achieved, so we have agreed to continue the competition at the next Compstat in Berlin.

The Winner

Only a small number of posters were in contention for the prize, and the judges were unanimous in agreeing to award to prize to:

Christof Nachtigall, Olivia Wüthrich-Martone and Rolf Steyer, of Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, for their poster
Causal unbiasedness outside randomised experiments: testing unconfoundedness

The poster had a good overall design and clear structure. The only criticism was that it contained a little too much material. A larger image of the poster is available - click here.

Highly Commended

The following three posters were highly commended by the judges. None were in final consideration for the overall prize, but all were particularly strong in some respect.

Process metadata for verifiable quality 
by Colin Smart and Karen Brannen, University of Edinburgh, UK. 
This poster had easily the most imaginative structure, but it was let down by poor execution of the details.

Using data from official statistics
by Ene Käärik, University of Tartu, Estonia 
This poster demonstrated that it is not necessary to have access to sophisticated graphics software or printers to achieve a good design. It used only A4 pages, but was clear and well-structured, and made good use of the display space.

Information technologies in an advanced statistics course 
Pilar Muños, José A. Gonzáles and Erik Cobo, UPC, Spain 
This poster demonstrated how the selection of material can be refined without loosing the ability to communicate. The headings were well chosen, and the details included all the main points but were still kept simple.