NeurIPS 2018 in Montreal was my first experience with the NeurIPS series of conferences. I was there primarily for Deep RL workshop and as an entrant to the Pommerman competition.

Overall it was a fantastic experience, and I met wonderful, brilliant people who are pushing the limits of RL in so many ways — I cannot wait until this year!

But Im not here to talk about that, nor my favourite poster of the session — but one avoidable thing that inconvenienced a lot of people.

Floor Plan Fail

Here is the floorplan for 220D in the Montreal Convention Centre where NeurIPS 2018 was held:

What you don’t get from this floorplan is a sense of just how huge this room is. It was many times larger than my elementary son’s school gym.

Now lets look at how the posters were arranged (added via Gimp):

There was a looong display wall (blue line below), which formed a narrow tunnel of , at most 12 feet wide, with posters on both sides.

About a third were on the outer side of the portable display wall (left side of blue line) — not in tunnel

About a third were on the inner side of the portable display wall (right side of blue line) — IN TUNNEL

About a third of the posters were along the main wall (purple line) — IN TUNNEL

(There were also at one point, posters waaaaay off to the other side of the massive room, ostensibly due to “lack of space” :/ )

So, fully two thirds of the posters in this main area, were in the red zone — The Tunnel.

Yes, Fully 2/3rds of NeurIPS 2018 Deep RL Workshop posters were crammed into The Tunnel

It was absolutely jam packed with people. I cannot count how many people I physically bumped into in The Tunnel.

If the poster you needed to see was in The Tunnel, it was absurdly difficult to even get to it. I had to skip many posters I wanted to see, because it was too crowded to push through The Tunnel.

If your own poster was in The Tunnel, there is no way this did not hurt the attention you got.

Meanwhile, the entire rest of the cavern that was 220D, lay completed empty.

What should they have done instead

Rules of thumb:

It should be relatively easy to walk directly from a doorway, to a poster of interest, and back.

When placing display walls in a line, provide a gap every few walls to minimize walking distance.

Avoid choke points in the flow of foot traffic.

Here are some suggestions for next time, note that none have a single super-long display wall. Of course, specific layout doesn’t matter just the rules above.