I’m not fond of conference posters. They’re often filled with details meaningful to the author but uninviting to an uninitiated observer.

However, there was a poster at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum that drew me in. The poster told a story. Here’s how it begins:

It is designed in the style of an xkcd comic strip and so it naturally stands out. I came for the comics, but I stayed for the story. The authors got me to willingly read their poster.

The title of the poster is “Data fusion by simultaneous matrix tri-factorization” by Marinka Zitnik and Blaz Zupan. It references this journal article with a similar title.