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Related to this, I quote from my unpublished manuscript:
This year the conferences are mostly held online. In the computer
science research community we should discuss the
question whether organizers should relax the requirement of physically
attending conferences if you wanted to publish. The business model
of journals
is a heated debate, so could be the conferences. Why build a paywall for
publications that does not go to reviewers but to the hotel,
catering and travel industry?
In poor regions going to expensive conferences is a problem.
The drawbacks of online conferences are obvious, but the advantages
are also. Why
attend a conference if you are interested only in a section and you
can follow
it through online broadcast?
Interestingly, even before we thought anything about a possible
pandemic, there
were voices of not holding that many conferences, due to the concern of the
ecologic footprint of long-distance flights \cite{Vardi-Publish-and-Perish}.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3373386
A response on twitter says
\begin{quote}It's a noble goal to reduce the CO${}_2$ footprint.
However, if you made physical attendance optional, neither
universities nor companies would support conference participation. A
decrease in physical attendance would also likely make conferences
financially infeasible. \cite{Leidner-declining-conferences}
\end{quote}
I disagree here: conferences might morph into something we haven't seen yet,
new business models can arise but the need for scientific discussion and
publications will keep them alive. Online conferences let isolated
researchers to participate and possibly joining distributed research groups.
An interesting outcome would be the merge of journals and
conferences, as it is
exemplified by the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, which
published papers from premier conferences like the Principles of Programming
Languages (POPL).
A conference held online this year, Logic in Computer Science already
changed how we do a conference: participants are expected to watch
presentations recorded in advance, letting more time to discuss research at
videoconference time.
A reviewer raised my attention about the drawbacks of moving
conferences online:
it is more difficult to build new friendships online, it is harder
to get ideas from
hallway discussions, no matter there are hallway Zoom channels for
us. Another
viewpoint is that funding organizations would spend less on
conferences and so
scientic life would be less human and more mechanized, as other
parts of our life.
Less discovering the world, less reward for spending much time in
front of your laptop.
That reviewer finds this effect on our culture risky.
---
- Gergely
Idézet (Jon Sterling <j...@jonmsterling.com>):
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I want to put in my agreement with Talia's second point that we
should move to a model in which deadlines are frequent and cheap to
miss (as is the case in every discipline that is lucky enough to be
based on journals) --- I would add that if we can move toward such a
system, it would probably be unnecessary to argue for the deadline
extensions that have such a detrimental effect on the work-life
balance of scientists (pace Talia's first point, which is well taken).
I've missed submitting to POPL several times because the deadlines
didn't line up with the stage of my research, but I am dreaming of a
future where it really matters less for me that my research happens
to be "medium rare" on approximately July 1st each year.
I also support and agree with everything that Gabriel has said in
this thread. I truly love workshops and seminars, and if I could
flush all these expensive and stressful conferences directly down
the toilet (together with the dogmatic ideology of our professional
organizations and their representatives, which we consume en gavage)
and instead just go to lovely low-stress workshops and send my work
periodically to journals, I would be so happy.
Best,
Jon
On Sun, Aug 23, 2020, at 11:11 AM, Talia Ringer wrote:
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I used to argue against changing conference deadline systems a lot, but the
pandemic response and political events in the US have made it clear to me
that this is a diversity issue. When a deadline is only once per year (and
some of us do not have work that easily crosses over to other major
conferences), missing it can be a major setback. And events like the
pandemic have a disproportionate impact on groups that are traditionally
underrepresented in our field. So the consequences of the deadline system
are very uneven and reinforce our field's current demographic.
I agree that it is absolutely prudent to take this opportunity to reflect
on our review process. I want to push strongly for moving to a model in
which deadlines exist but are much more frequent (say, monthly or
quarterly). I think the approach Gabriel Scherer mentioned that is taken by
"The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming" would be better both for
science and for diversity in our field.
Talia
https://dependenttyp.es/
On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 7:07 AM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.sche...@gmail.com>
wrote:
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]
I am in broad agreement with many of Flavien's points. I hope that we can
learn how to do virtual conferences well so that we can reduce our travel
footprint in the future, not just due to pandemic issues. In this respect I
have been fairly impressed with the degree of investment of many members of
our community in finding and building better tools for virtual conferences.
Thanks!
I hope that this major change (that is imposed to us for an unpredictable
amount of time) could also be an occasion to seriously consider
de-synchronizing publication of our work from conference presentations. I
think that journal publications have better academic review process, but
we've been traditionally tied to major conferences as publication venues.
Maybe it is time to change this? In this respect an interesting approach is
"The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming" journal which is coupled
with the <Programming> conference: journal publishes four volumes a year
(trying to fit a three-months reviewing process), and the conference is
held annually, with all papers accepted during the year presented.
Forced-online venues could be an occasion to experiment with this. (We
could think of other formats, such as having a *seminar* attached to a
journal instead of a conference; so far I found it easier to enjoy online
seminars than online conferences.)
On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 2:47 PM Flavien Breuvart <
breuv...@lipn.univ-paris13.fr> wrote:
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Dear colleagues,
This spring, under unfortunate circumstances, many conferences held
virtually. We have witnessed the disadvantages of such dispositives, but
also its numerous advantages. Many of those conferences have had
internal debates for debriefing this experiences, but I haven't seen any
large and public debate inside the community. I was hopping that some of
you may engage in such debates.
As a starting point, I will try to succinctly expose my own point of
view, which is probably subjective, politically charged, and highly
debatable, but this is the whole point :-)
I think we where all impressed by the high level of attendance of
conferences and workshops. But when thinking back at it, this situation
is perfectly normal as virtual conferences opened several blockades
usually preventing people from coming, in particular via the absence of
fees, the flexibility with respect to other duties (familial, teaching
or administrative), or the weight of travels. Even if this was the only
reason, I think it would be worth considering to secure part of these
improvements.
Another, huge (but politically charged) advantage, is the drastic
reduction of the carbon footprint of our conferences. Several colleges
are advocating for a public engagement of the community to reduce its
global footprint. For example, see https://tcs4f.org/ which is a group
advocating for a 50% carbon reduction in theoretical computer sciences.
I have no doubt that other such initiative exist here and there; this
year unfortunate event at least showed that they are well founded and
not unreachable.
That being said, I have to address the fact that our virtual conferences
had technical issues and that physical ones have several other
advantages. Concerning the technical issues (timeline clashes, internet
connection, organization...), I strongly believe that time and
experience can overcome most of them; I was helping in the organization
comity of FSCD and it appear that many issues could have been avoided by
a few technical adjustments (such as assigning two co-chairs for each
sessions for example).
Concerning the advantages of conferences, I see three important ones :
1) the chance encounters, 2) the strengthening of collaborations, and 3)
the prolonged focus. 1) From my (short) experience, the first can happen
in smaller scale meetings, that can be mostly local (with a minority of
invited non-local visitors). 2) The best way to strengthen
collaborations is not conferences but lab invitations (which could be
more frequent without conferences fees and time expenditures). 3) I got
the impression that most people where not as focus as in traditional
conferences, but not to a big margin, and mainly by lack of routine
(here I distinguish independent seminars and regular courses, as all
teachers I have seen the disaster of virtualization among our
students...).
All in all, I would advocate for more small scale meetings, more lab
invitations, but a virtualization of big scale conferences, and (why
not), the securing of some international virtual seminar that where very
interesting (thank you for the organizers that took those initiatives !).
I hope I was not too long and too boring, do not hesitate to contradict
me, all I want is to start a fruitful debate.
Best,
Flavien
