Getting to grips with online conferences

Saliba, Michael

doi:10.1038/s41560-020-0656-z

Cited by 18 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…Alternatively, as some delegates reported in survey responses, they may have become fatigued from continuous online viewing. Termed “video call fatigue” or “Zoom fatigue,” online meetings may be more tiring than in‐person talks as it requires more concentration to engage with nonverbal cues, work against technical issues, and be more attentive to online speakers (Fosslein & Duffy, 2020; Saliba, 2020; Wiederhold, 2020) Data collection from additional meetings and a better understanding of viewer behavior is needed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This online conference format is likely to be an increasingly normal situation as scientific interest groups and learned societies consider delivering virtual noncommercial scientific meetings to replace established small‐ to medium‐sized real‐world meetings. Recently, papers and preprints outlining advice and guidance for developing an online conference have become available to support future event organizers (e.g., Busse & Kleiber, 2020; Gichora et al., 2010; Harabor & Vallati, 2020; Lortie, 2020; Roos et al., 2020; Saliba, 2020; Seery & Flaherty, 2020), yet few have explored delegate engagement with these online formats or considered if online conferences should differ from their traditional in‐person counterparts. In order to help future meeting planners with decision‐making, we have reported the patterns of attendance and engagement with our meeting, highlighted where loads may be uneven, and used these data to indicate which components were particularly (un)popular.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Moving academic conferences online: Understanding patterns of delegate engagement

Raby¹,

Madden

2021

Ecology and Evolution

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Academic and scientific conferences are necessary for the dissemination of research, for networking, and to support professional development (Rowe, 2018;Yoo & Chon, 2008). Communication between researchers and other stakeholders occurs formally at talks and poster sessions, and informally at social events, while professional development usually occurs through workshops and mentoring events. Traditionally, conferences have been held as in-person meetings, and with the increase in international collaborations, delegates travel across the globe to attend these events. Yet, the ethics of conferences have been called into question (e.g., Fraser et al., 2017;Holden et al., 2017). If these events are so integral to scientific development should we accept that they exclude participation of researchers with limited funding? Should we accept that conference travel results in such a large carbon footprint? Alternatively, online conferencing has provided an option for researchers to connect without the same commitment to cost, time, and carbon impact (e.g., Raby & Madden, in review). Online conferences started off as a simple email-based event (Anderson, 1996), and due to the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly become more common and integral to scientific communication (Milić et al., 2020;Viglione, 2020). In order to maintain the enthusiasm of online conferencing, it is vital that we take this opportunity to feedback from the events that have been organized during the COVID-19 pandemic. The key indicator of delegate enthusiasm for online conference material is their engagement during the event, either indicated quantitatively by their accessing different parts of the meeting (e.g., visiting webpages, viewing

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving academic conferences online: Understanding patterns of delegate engagement

Raby¹,

Madden

2021

Ecology and Evolution

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“…It can be argued that online conference hosting is much less complex and opportunistic than the in-person experience, but not always. 1 2 In the case of WISH, seeing as preparations for the innovation competition had been long in the making, the pandemic did not affect the overall recruitment or judging processes which were already in place and conducted virtually regardless of summit format. However, other challenges were encountered when it came to execution.…”

Section: Introduction: World Innovation Summit For Health Innovation mentioning

confidence: 97%

Exploring the challenges and hidden opportunities of hosting a virtual innovation competition in the time of COVID-19

Akoum¹,

Achi²

2021

BMJ Innov

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“…They are hugely economical due to reduced organizational costs, and they foster inclusivity by significantly improving the scale and outreach [2]. However, online conferences have their own set of challenges, such as, scaling up participation depends on stable and high-speed Internet in different regions; sometimes participants and speakers need to be trained on different conferencing tools for efficient participation [29]. A big challenge in organizing an online conference is optimal scheduling of the conference talks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction

Patro,

Jana,

Chakraborty

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches. CCS CONCEPTS• Theory of computation → Scheduling algorithms.

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Getting to grips with online conferences

Cited by 18 publications

References 6 publications

Moving academic conferences online: Understanding patterns of delegate engagement

Moving academic conferences online: Understanding patterns of delegate engagement

Exploring the challenges and hidden opportunities of hosting a virtual innovation competition in the time of COVID-19

Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction

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