poster - What do I do if my results are not ready before a conference?

My supervisor encouraged me to apply for a conference presentation, as he had funding for me to go. The problem was that I had no results at the time, since the conference date was six months after the abstract deadline. At the time I thought I would have results in time so I wrote an abstract (stating what I plan to do and why it is important, but posted no results) and got accepted for a poster presentation.

Now it is 1 week before the conference and I have very poor results. I was able to complete the experiment, but the the results are much too poor to present. Unfortunately I have no time to redo anything and do not have any previous research (am a masters student). Which one of these is worse?:

1. Presenting meaningless results just so you can present


2. Presenting a vague poster (show the theory, methodology, importance, but no tangible results) to get around poor data.


3. Not showing up to the conference and get a partial refund.

Answer

As so often, this may be field-specific, so I'm giving a CS perspective:

Posters are not full papers. Often, it is totally acceptable that a poster presents work in progress, or preliminary results. While a paper adds some vague hints to separate future steps in continuing the research after presenting a finished contribution, on a poster, that can well be the other way round.

Therefore: Use the opportunity to show what you have done so far and where you want to go from there on your poster. Reconsider what the gist of the poster is - you may have to give up the plan that the poster is about your results, and switch the focus of your poster to talking about your research process. That way, you can present the goal of your poster to collect comments and suggestions on how to retrieve some meaningful results in the direction you're interested in.

Like this, you are not presenting just so you can present, you are presenting because it is the best way to get concrete comments by other researchers.

Of course, it depends on what exactly you have written in your poster abstract. If you explicitly said there that the poster will focus on results, the situation may be more problematic.