The cost of virtualizing CS conferences
rachitnigam.com
rachitnigam.com
Speaking for myself I never benefited much from the hallway track, because it relies on the type of in-person socializing skills that I’ve always struggled with. Conferences feel like a grown-up intellectual version of a junior high dance to me! A virtual forum could be a boon to people with good technical ideas but high introversion.
Of course, maybe one’s passion for research is supposed to override one’s shyness. I’m unsure which bar I personally failed to clear :-)
This sounds like IRC, or whatever the preference is these days.
As a conference organiser myself, I think it's perfectly fine for people to not enjoy the hallway track.
These people might be the ones who benefit the most from sitting in the talk room, and being exposed to the variety of ideas that a conference would hopefully offer.
I also think that it's perfectly fine to just crowd around a speaker (at least, in pre-COVID times), and just listen in on the technical conversations that other attendees are having with them.
In any conference the hallway track is the most important to me and it has happened more than once that I have failed to attend a single formal presentation yet found the conference a great success. But I have noticed that these threads are just as vital.
Of late all of them have switched to 80% covid-19 of course. Fortunately not exclusively.
I think this has more potential than the OP considered, but you have to optimize for asynchronous communication. Have conversations in chat, but if there's someone you want to talk to in particular direct message or email them. If the two of you seem mutually interested in each other's ideas, set up a time to have a live conversation
I feel some sympathy for grad students, but am personally quite excited to see how this plays out since I've wanted virtual conferences to be more of a thing since I started pirating Blackhat/DEF CON videos as a teenager :)
Or you split the difference of about 9 hours of time zones to accommodate the western US through central Europe with the event starting about 7am in California and ending around 9pm in Europe. And, for a US event, you basically ignore Asia.
This all worked pretty well for what is decidedly a very social activity, I presume breakouts could just happen in other streams with a moderator handling chat q&a for the presenter.
and in particular some of the notes on poster sessions: https://blairmacintyre.me/2020/04/10/doing-a-poster-session-...
In practice, people consumed the keynote/talk content in a variety of formats (streamed, recorded, and in-VR) and there was a fantastic networking and meeting-new-people effect in the poster, hallway (post-talk), and demo sessions. There's a bunch of formal research that was done there along with post-conference surveys to track down specific data (e.g., how many new people did you meet?) but it will take some time for those teams to rigorously collect & report.
The irony of this seems lost on the author. While I am glad that CS has truly split into a scientific discipline separate both from mathematics and engineering (this was not yet the case when I was in school), CS of all disciplines should be able to progress remotely.
Physics has been the innovator in this regard, with preprint journals (Physics review letters grew from letters into a journal) to HTTP & HTML, and open preprint servers. It's a pity that CS has gone the other way, which limits its openness to scientists around the world!
CS does progress remotely—the publishing model in CS allows authors to easily and openly distribute our papers by putting them up on arvix and our webpages which doesn’t seem to be true of physics journals.
The post is directed to solving the problems of networking. It doesn’t say anything about the orthogonal problem of open access of research.
I mentioned physics pecifically because it is the progenitor of this approach.
> CS allows authors to easily and openly distribute our papers by putting them up on arvix and our webpages which doesn’t seem to be true of physics journals.
ArXiv started as a physics preprint server so I don’t understand how you could claim that physicists don’t have such a system. And of course WWW and HTML came from physics, not computer science.
More to the point, though physics also has conferences, modern physics developed In the early 20th mostly without them travel was more complex in those days. The modern conception of journals dates to this period (and cf my comments about Physics Letters).
Conferences as experienced in CS are even less vital in mathematics than in Physics.
None of which is to claim physicists are somehow superior in some way! I’m just saying that it’s ironic that CS, of all disciplines, has a social model more like the social science than the physical sciences. Perhaps that is what should change, and there are good wxetant models to follow.
I run the SF Django Meetup and we're hosting a nationwide virtual meetup this upcoming Wednesday. We have over 350 people RSVP'd and though I'm excited about bringing so many people together, it's not lost on me that those magical serendipitous moments aren't going to happen.
I'll be involved in some virtual conference chats over the next few weeks. We'll see how it goes.
If you don't set aside the time why did you sign up?
It seemed like it might be interesting at the time I signed up. It's not unusual for me to have 2 or even 3 low-priority things on my calendar at the same time. To say nothing of ongoing projects that seem more urgent on a given day and which I don't want to interrupt for some webinar.
There's a lot of stuff on my calendar that's either standing calls that I join if the agenda or immediate situation warrants or interesting-looking presentations that I'll listen to on a time-available basis but which aren't necessary.
SF cons are like this too, though “making various social connections with other people who have this niche interest” is a big part of why you’re explicitly there. Meet weirdos you don’t have to explain your weird interest to, hang out, have some activities to share but feel free to make up your own fun and games.
The organized portion of any conference is there to provide a starting point for some of the Hallway Track, and an excuse for you to leave your normal life behind for a few days to commit to being in the same place as a bunch of other people who do whatever the con’s about.
Yes me too.
> an excuse for you to leave your normal life behind for a few days to commit to being in the same place as a bunch of other people who do whatever the con’s about
Exactly, I don't want an excuses. I think we should be honest with each other about the value of the hallway track alone and not need an excuse. I think that honesty will lead to better outcomes.
1. Pure "Collaboration" being a "soft" nice-sounding word institutions won't buy your plane tickets for.
Planes are bad and those institutions are being bad for thinking that collaboration. Do cheaper rail-accessible regional events, which also help with communication graph ossification and density, to negotiate with them better.
2. Academic rat race becoming ever more pernicious as job market grows tighter.
Academia is broken and research is yielding a lot less per cost than it used to. Academia needs to fix its shit or some right-wing goverment is going to succeed in turning off the money hose. I have zero interest in seeing status-quo-preserving procrastination on this front.
3. People that aren't qualified to partake in hallway chat are still eyeballs for marketting at industry conferences.
Let's not hitch everything good in the world to the monster than is marketing and advertising?
4. Big conferences are more glamorous
Giant hotel are is tasteless and so are people that uncritically enjoy them. But OK fine, Vegas conferences are exempt from my proposals.
It's hard to do that at a big event where a lot of attendees really are there to learn the latest features of Product X. And furthermore, I imagine a lot of managers would look askance at a request to travel across the country and hang out for a few days.
But these are exactly the sorts of conversions that many communities should be having anyways.