Going Virtual

The ICLR 2020 conference, as mentioned in a previous blog post was scheduled to take place in Addis Ababa this year. The key motivation for hosting one of the largest conferences in AI on the African continent was driven problems encountered by presenters and attendees from African countries facing visa issues to visit the NeurIPS 2019 conference in Canada¹.

Then came COVID-19. A pandemic of historic proportions that is changing daily life as we know it resulting in conferences being postponed or going on-line.

The silver lining is that for the first time many people have been able to follow the speakers, attend Q&As and network with attendees at an event that would have been far out of reach. Travel from African countries and many other developing nations to events in Europe and North America is costly and time consuming and that is after many hoops have been jumped through to be granted a visa.

I was fortunate to attend the virtual conference as one of the many on-line volunteers helping people navigate and use the conference tools and links to talks. While in-person conferences will have advantages over purely virtual ones we can only hope that access to these amazing events will still be provided after we get through the current health crises.

The organisation and running of a conference of this size which had little time to prepare for going virtual was fantastic. While many conferences have been cancelled the dedication of the ICRL 2020 team to continue to host the event should be applauded and remembered.

A great write-up explaining the lessons learnt can be found here, Gone Virtual: Lessons from ICLR2020, and the ACM has also released a report to help those wanting to run these types of conferences : Virtual Conferences A Guide to Best Practices

Here’s to seeing more of you on-line.

1. 2018/11/19 Major AI Conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

Written By: David Clark

Image credit: here