Monday, February 23, 2026

Wish: Scientific Poster Snap Organizer App

AGBT is another conference with a wonderful wealth of scientific posters and never enough time to view them all properly. I definitely enjoy engaging scientists - particularly early stage scientists such as graduate students - at their posters, but poster session times are traps for other conversations and all too often are booked-over with meetings.  And I'm not adept at time management.  Just a bit over a week ago, I found myself furiously running through the posters at SLAS on the last day, trying to capture them on my phone while lamenting the ones I already saw being carted away.  So now I've converted the problem of spending time on each poster to a future time - but can I have more than just a collection of photos on my devices?
These days, the solution to everything is supposedly AI, and I have access to Gemini Enterprise at work.  Plus I am feeling at risk of being a superannuated canine, so important to learn this newfangled vibe coding stuff.  So surely I could get Gemini to make a handy version of the photos?

Well, first attempts have been lacking.  Yes, I did get it to find some themes and give me a spreadsheet of poster titles marked with those themes.  Well, a CSV I can copy-and-paste into a spreadsheet - apparently it's not allowed to write files.  

But what I really want is something closer to a scrapbooking environment, in which I can both use AI but also my own thought processes to organize the posters into a many-to-many mapping with categories - some of which AI won't be able to discern.  Things like "business development opportunities" or "blog ideas".  Each with the full image and the extracted text.  Even better if the poster number and floor location and time I snapped was included as well - sometimes I remember one poster by its geographical position in the room or relative to another poster

Has somebody already built this?  If I paste the above mess into Gemini, will it generate some working Python code?  It's a bit of a running theme - I'd like this capability in many other contexts.  

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