[Rant] Online Conferences

hey machine learners Yannick here okay that is stolen today I want to give some quick thoughts about online conferences as you might know I clear this year is fully online because of the global situation big props to the organizers of the conference for putting something together in this short amount of time i clears one of the largest machine learning conferences and if you're not registered you don't get access to that website right now so today I'll just talk about things that are public and we'll do like analysis of what happened when the materials are actually released if you want to run an online conferences they're basically two things you need to take care of actually three one of them is networking but it's going to be online we're gonna have to sacrifice that I know there are efforts but let's be real so there are paper presentations and there are things like talks panels workshops and so on for the papers in I clear what they have is that website and you can kind of click on each of the papers you'll get to a sub page and you'll find a video that the author's uploaded which is about five minutes long don't get the abstract and the reviews directly they're from open review and during the poster sessions you'll have a chat window where you can chat with the authors and so people can come there and kind of chat about the paper at a given time what people have pointed out here and I agree is that watching a five minute video often you need like two or three minutes of that video to even see whether you're interested in the paper which is much longer than you would have at a poster at a foster you could clearly see people say they just open the PDF and just kind of gloss over it and that takes 30 seconds to decide whether or not you're interested if I were to suggest an improvement it would be also have the authors upload a poster though at a glance you'll be able to see what interests you write for the talks and the panels the talks are pre-recorded and then there is a question and answer session that is live the questions are voted beforehand and then the most voted questions I believe will be answered in a live session by either the talk giver or the panel discussion is that is the conference but what are we doing here I kind of think it's a paradoxical thing to take the live conference and just try to map it as close as possible to online look at these paper poster sessions right it is cool that you have all this but now I have to go at that particular time to chat with the authors and this is in competition to everything else that's happening at the same time right so there will be a hundred papers that are presented in a given session and now I can go to this one and chat here but I'll miss the chat over there of course I can read it later but the only reason that is in the live conference is because everyone's just there for one week right that's about the span you can hold people in one place so you need to cram things at the same time so you're at the poster session you will miss this poster if you go to this poster right you just don't have time but online we're not constrained by this so why aren't we doing this at the same time a synchronously we actually have a perfect system for doing things like this it's called YouTube you publish a paper you can make it you can be five minutes could be 30 minutes you put it on YouTube you link to your paper your abstract and your reviews you can put them in the description and then okay there's no live chat but there is a comment section I appreciate all of you thank you but we have a perfectly fine system for that to do this in an asynchronous way I don't see the benefit of having really this live chat and the talks and the panels the same thing you have you already have pre-recorded talks what are you doing having them compete with other things at the same time like okay go to this workshop but this one's happening too right now I have to go and decide because everything needs crammed into this one week it just seems to make no sense for example on our channel machine learning straight talk we have guests on and we'll do reddit threads to ask people which questions would they like the author's or the people that we have on to answer and people up and down both the questions and then we have a panel discussion we could even do this live right on YouTube and then record it and it will be almost the same experience because let's be honest if yoshua bengio is in a panel in a live conference you'll be lucky to even get a single question and it will

almost never happen that you'll get a follow-up question because you're right there live it's just not something that is really happening I think the main advantage of these live conferences is the fact that you're there if you go to a poster session the face-to-face interaction is something very different from a chat window you can kind of see what the author is thinking in real time you can ask them questions so in writing you can always weasel out of difficult questions or so yeah so it seems like you lose all the benefits of the live conference but if you do it in this way you retain all the bad sites namely the crowdedness different things competing at the same time entry fees I get it it's a lot of work to build this website and so on but we have YouTube and read it and that already covers like 95 percent of what this is doing I always think of this I don't know if it's a myth when the car was first invented it still had be pulleys to pull the horse because people were just used to horse buggies and not cars it seems like we're doing the same thing with online conferences we were just so used to the live conferences that we don't see the mega possibilities that we have online these are my thoughts on online conferences if you agree disagree leave a comment and maybe in the future of will go to through online conferences asynchronous thank you for being here and what I