Organising a Successful Online AI Conference: Lessons from SoCS 2020

Daniel Harabor; Mauro Vallati

Organising a Successful Online AI Conference: Lessons from SoCS 2020

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

The 13th Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) was held May 26–28, 2020. Originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, the symposium pivoted toward a fully online technical program in early March. As an in-person event SoCS offers participants a diverse array of scholarly activities including technical talks (long and short), poster sessions, plenary sessions, a community meeting and, new for 2020, a Master Class tutorial program. This paper describes challenges, approaches and opportunities associated with adapting these many different activities to the online setting. We consider issues such as scheduling, dissemination, attendee interaction and community engagement before, during and after the event. We report on the approaches taken by SoCS in each case, we give a post-hoc analysis of their their effectiveness and we discuss how these decisions continue to impact the SoCS community in the days after SoCS 2020. This work will be of interest to organisers of similar conferences who may be considering the switch to an online format.

Original language	English
Journal	AI Magazine
Publication status	Accepted/In press - 12 Oct 2020

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Organising_a_Successful_Online_Conference__Lessons_from_SoCS_2020
Accepted author manuscript, 214 KB
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title = "Organising a Successful Online AI Conference: Lessons from SoCS 2020",

abstract = "The 13th Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) was held May 26–28, 2020. Originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, the symposium pivoted toward a fully online technical program in early March. As an in-person event SoCS offers participants a diverse array of scholarly activities including technical talks (long and short), poster sessions, plenary sessions, a community meeting and, new for 2020, a Master Class tutorial program. This paper describes challenges, approaches and opportunities associated with adapting these many different activities to the online setting. We consider issues such as scheduling, dissemination, attendee interaction and community engagement before, during and after the event. We report on the approaches taken by SoCS in each case, we give a post-hoc analysis of their their effectiveness and we discuss how these decisions continue to impact the SoCS community in the days after SoCS 2020. This work will be of interest to organisers of similar conferences who may be considering the switch to an online format.",

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