---
pubDate: 2022-01-28
title: Reflections on Academic Conferences
tags:
  - academics
abstract: |
  Academic conferences are large formal gatherings where researchers in a
  particular field share their refereed results in the form of talks and
  workshops. What are the goals of such conferences, and how well do they
  achieve them in practice?
table_of_contents: true
---

## Introduction

I recently attended POPL 2022 in Philadelphia, which is an academic conference
on the _principles of programming languages_ -- in my field of research as a PhD
student. This was the first academic conference I attended in person (I have
attended several online conferences previously), and from my experience there I
have refined many ideas I've been developing about the purpose and effectiveness
of conferences.

One reason this experience was unique was that it was a hybrid conference due to
the COVID-19 pandemic -- that is, the conference was hosted with full online
support in mind.

- every talk was facilitated with a live video feed streamed to online
  participants
- the stream was equipped with live transcription (very high quality)
- the majority of talks were given by online speakers
- online participants could ask questions during talks

But for physical participants, everything was conducted pretty much as normal
except for the mandatory mask-wearing at all times of course.

## Ideals

The main goals of a conference, it appears to me, are:

- provide a research for researchers to perform their results as
  broadly-consumable talks
- curate a selection of results to present to researchers in related fields that
  they wouldn't have easily found normally
- host workshops where senior researchers pass on wisdom to junior researchers
- gather researchers from many different institutions so they can make
  connections and exchange developing ideas

## Realities

How do real conferences live up to these ideals?

### Online Conferences

During the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all academic conferences were converted to
online events, and only recently have they started to be hosted in a hybrid
model like POPL 2022 that I attended physically. This provided a unique
opportunity to see how much of the "conference experience" could be translated
into an online and often asynchronous experience when it was forced to.

Online conferences have exactly 1 worthwhile feature, which is providing the
opportunity to ask speakers questions right after they give their talk (though,
often the talk itself was pre-recorded). But even this feature is not very good,
because most times the audience doesn't have any good questions to ask, and then
they are pressured to come up with sub-par questions to ask just to show respect
to the speaker.

Other than this 1 feature, online conferences provide pretty much nothing else
worthwhile in terms of a conference experience, these non-worthwhile features
being:

- talks. If you don't make use of the Q&A section after the talk, this is a
  strictly worse experience than just watching the recorded talk later, since
  the recorded talk can be watched at any time, paused, and with modified
  playback-speed.
- social events. It is very difficult to get that to work out well with a large
  collection of strangers, or more likely a very small collection of strangers
  because most people would rather spend time with the people that are actually
  near them physically.
- virtual "hallways". It's a cool idea, but apparently we don't have the
  technology for this yet. VR chat work better. In practice, a virtual hallway
  is just a list of people that are willing to chat with anyone who wants to
  click on them. And not many people are interested in that. A real conference
  hallway works by you wandering around until you hear an interesting
  conversation or are introduced to someone by a mutual connection.

Of course, I'm sure that on the backend there are still significances to
conferences that we unchanged by being hosted online, such as financials and
curating research results. But I'm not focussing on those factors here.

What online conference attendees discovered was that the talks are not a very
important aspect of why they attend conferences. They are more of a background
ambiance for the hallways discussions and social gatherings.

### Hybrid Conferences

TODO