[Rant] Online Conferences
machine learning deep learning online conference iclr virtual research
Are virtual conferences good or bad? What's missing? How do we go forward? 

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 Hey, machine learners! Janek here. Okay, that is stolen. Today I want to give some quick thoughts about online conferences. As you might know, iClear 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. iClear is 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 conference there are 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 iClear what they have is they have a 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 authors uploaded which is about five minutes long. You'll get the abstract and the reviews directly there 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 poster 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 so at a glance you'll be able to see what interests you right. 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 discussionists. That is the conference but what what are we doing here? I I kind of think it's a paradoxical thing to take the live conference and just try to map it as closely as possible to online. Look at these paper poster 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 are we doing this at the same time? Why aren't we doing this asynchronously? We actually have a perfect system for doing things like this. It's called YouTube. You publish a paper you can make it. It can be five minutes. It can 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 I'm going to go to this workshop but this one's happening too. Right now I have to go and decide because everything needs to be crammed into this one week. It just seems to make no sense. For example on our channel Machine Learning Street Talk we have guests on and we'll do Reddit threads to ask people which questions would they like the authors or the people that we have on to answer and people up and down vote 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 Joshua Benjo is in a panel in a live conference you'll be lucky to even get a single question in 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 sides 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 Reddit and that already covers like 95% 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 the 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 we'll go to true online conferences asynchronous. Thank you for being here and bye bye.
 Hey, machine learners! Janek here. Okay, that is stolen. Today I want to give some quick
 thoughts about online conferences. As you might know, iClear 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. iClear is 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 conference
 there are 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 iClear what they have is they have a 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 authors uploaded
 which is about five minutes long. You'll get the abstract and the reviews directly there 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 poster 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 so at a glance
 you'll be able to see what interests you right. 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 discussionists. That is the conference but what what are we doing here? I
 I kind of think it's a paradoxical thing to take the live conference and just try to map it as
 closely as possible to online. Look at these paper poster 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 are we doing this at the same time? Why aren't we doing
 this asynchronously? We actually have a perfect system for doing things like this. It's called
 YouTube. You publish a paper you can make it. It can be five minutes. It can 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 I'm going to go to this workshop but this one's happening too. Right now I have to
 go and decide because everything needs to be crammed into this one week. It just seems to
 make no sense. For example on our channel Machine Learning Street Talk we have guests on and we'll
 do Reddit threads to ask people which questions would they like the authors or the people that we
 have on to answer and people up and down vote 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 Joshua Benjo is in a panel in a live conference you'll be lucky
 to even get a single question in 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 sides
 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 Reddit and that already covers
 like 95% 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 the 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 we'll go to true online conferences asynchronous. Thank you for being here and bye bye.