by Alex Potanin on Aug 25, 2022 | Tags: climate change, conferences, diversity, hybrid
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many conferences were held online starting in late March 2020, and several of us helped with the fully virtual offering of SPLASH 2020. By mid-2021, however, vaccination was widespread and effective at preventing COVID infection and severe disease, and it became feasible to consider in-person attendance at conferences. Polls of authors and the larger community indicated strong interest in holding an in-person version of SPLASH. Still, as of October 2021 the US had not relaxed its travel restrictions on people from large parts of the world, and even beyond that some people would not be able to travel to SPLASH. We therefore decided to offer SPLASH as a Hybrid conference in October 2021, offering both in-person and virtual attendance options. We were also excited about piloting a hybrid conference, because there are many longer-term benefits if we can run them well, including supporting both in-person networking and accessibility for attendees who can only attend remotely. We knew doing so would be hard, but we also hoped to learn valuable lessons. SPLASH 2021 turned out to be an interesting case study as the first major post-COVID PL conference to go hybrid, and one of the earliest across the ACM as well.
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by Mary Sheeran on Mar 15, 2022 | Tags: academic culture, academic observers, changing Universities, gender equality in academia, honest conversations
We all need to step up and start working to improve gender equality in computer science and engineering. This is the second of two blog posts about this fascinating and frustrating problem, in which I provide three suggestions for how to get started.
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by Mary Sheeran on Jan 27, 2022 | Tags: Academia, action, community, culture, gender equality, STEM
We all need to step up and start working to improve gender equality in computer science and engineering. In two blog posts, I give my view of this fascinating and frustrating problem. I provide three suggestions for how to get started.
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by Michael Greenberg on Apr 13, 2021 | Tags: explainers, interactive, journal, open access, publishing, web
Academic communities have increased the reach and accessibility of their work by publishing interactive, open-access, open-source articles on the web that explain both core and emerging ideas in their fields. It’s time for the PL community to do the same.
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by Joseph W. Cutler, Harry Goldstein, Andrew K. Hirsch, Jaemin Hong, and Chandrakana Nandi on Mar 25, 2021 | Tags: conferences, covid-19, early-career researchers, virtual conferences
Five early-career researchers bring their perspective to the debate on conference formats after COVID. They discuss the needs of junior researchers and how different approaches address those needs.
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by Jens Palsberg, Emery Berger, Derek Dreyer, Michael Hicks, and Jan Vitek on Mar 9, 2021 | Tags: conferences, covid-19, virtual conferences
After COVID, what do we want our conferences to look like? We will examine some options and ask you to fill out a survey.
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