This week, I’m at Zoomplitudes!

My field’s big yearly conference, Amplitudes, was supposed to happen in Michigan this year, but with the coronavirus pandemic it was quickly clear that would be impossible. Luckily, Anastasia Volovich stepped in to Zoomganize the conference from Brown.

The conference is still going, so I’ll say more about the scientific content later. (Except to say there have been a lot of interesting talks!) Here, I’ll just write a bit about the novel experience of going to a conference on Zoom.

Time zones are always tricky in an online conference like this. Our field is spread widely around the world, but not evenly: there are a few areas with quite a lot of amplitudes research. As a result, Zoomganizing from the US east coast seems like it was genuinely the best compromise. It means the talks start a bit early for the west coast US (6am their time), but still end not too late for the Europeans (10:30pm CET). The timing is awkward for our colleagues in China and Taiwan, but they can still join in the morning session (their evening). Overall, I don’t think it was possible to do better there.

Usually, Amplitudes is accompanied by a one-week school for Master’s and PhD students. That wasn’t feasible this year, but to fill the gap Nima Arkani-Hamed gave a livestreamed lecture the Friday before, which apparently clocked in at thirteen hours!

One aspect of the conference that really impressed me was the Slack space. The organizers wanted to replicate the “halls” part of the conference, with small groups chatting around blackboards between the talks. They set up a space on the platform Slack, and let attendees send private messages and make their own channels for specific topics. Soon the space was filled with lively discussion, including a #coffeebreak channel with pictures of everyone’s morning coffee. I think the organizers did a really good job of achieving the kind of “serendipity” I talked about in this post, where accidental meetings spark new ideas. More than that, this is the kind of thing I’d appreciate even in face-to-face conferences. The ability to message anyone at the conference from a shared platform, to have discussions that anyone can stumble on and read later, to post papers and links, all of this seems genuinely quite useful. As one of the organizers for Amplitudes 2021, I may soon get a chance to try this out.

Zoom itself worked reasonably well. A few people had trouble connecting or sharing screens, but overall things worked reliably, and the Zoom chat window is arguably better than people whispering to each other in the back of an in-person conference. One feature of the platform that confused people a bit is that co-hosts can’t raise their hands to ask questions: since speakers had to be made co-hosts to share their screens they had a harder time asking questions during other speakers’ talks.

A part I was more frustrated by was the scheduling. Fitting everyone who wanted to speak between 6am west coast and 10:30pm Europe must have been challenging, and the result was a tightly plotted conference, with three breaks each no more than 45 minutes. That’s already a bit tight, but it ended up much tighter because most talks went long. The conference’s 30 minute slots regularly took 40 minutes, between speakers running over and questions going late. As a result, the conference’s “lunch break” (roughly dinner break for the Europeans) was often only 15 minutes. I appreciate the desire for lively discussion, especially since the conference is recorded and the question sessions can be a resource for others. But I worry that, as a pitfall of remote conferences, the inconveniences people suffer to attend can become largely invisible. Yes, we can always skip a talk, and watch the recording later. Yes, we can prepare food beforehand. Still, I don’t think a 15 minute lunch break was what the organizers had in mind, and if our community does more remote conferences we should brainstorm ways to avoid this problem next time.

I’m curious how other fields are doing remote conferences right now. Even after the pandemic, I suspect some fields will experiment with this kind of thing. It’s worth sharing and paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.