In computer science it's against the rules to publish your work in many prestigious venues unless you physically travel to present that work at a conference!
They seem to be forgetting that there's a thing called the "internet" that makes this unnecessary. Pretty weird for computer scientists.
Here's the famous computer scientist Moshe Vardi on how this needs to change:
"As I argued in January 2020, in view of the worsening climate crisis, our discipline's practice that every publication requires travel, often trans-oceanic, is inconsistent with the public good. A report released in March 2023 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints an even bleaker picture of the worsening climate crisis. The world is on brink of catastrophic warming, the report warned. A dangerous climate threshold is near, but 'it does not mean we are doomed' if swift action is taken, the scientists said."
"Going back to the pre-pandemic conference-travel culture is simply not morally acceptable, I believe. Yet many conferences have gone back to a full in-person model, and authors are required to present in person. This requirement is drawing criticism. A recent article by Theoretical Computer Scientists for Future (TCS4F) concluded, 'Coupling formal publications with an in-person gathering no longer makes sense for everyone.'"
@johncarlosbaez Thankfully some venues are moving away from this. The main Programming Languages conferences (POPL, ICFP, OOPSLA, PLDI) are now part of the PACMPL journal, and I think a condition of that was making attendance non-mandatory. There's also conferences with journal-first options, so you can submit to JFP or TOPLAS as a journal and then optionally present at a conference later.
@johncarlosbaez I have only collaborated in your field so the link to publications is not my native heath. When I was looking for ways around this issue, pre-pandemic, I found this thoughtful on enabling a rich experience remotely:
Explorations of Remote Attendance at CHI
Posted on 15th February 2019.
Carman Neustaedter and Anthony Tang, CHI 2019 Telepresence Co-Chairs.
➡️ https://chi2019.acm.org/2019/02/15/explorations-of-remote-attendance-at-chi/
and I'll link to one more below, on localising global, in-person events
Thanks for the link to the CARE format, @A_J_Millar !
"I have only collaborated in your field so the link to publications is not my native heath."
By the way, my field is mathematics, not computer science. Mathematicians tend to be shocked and confused when they hear about how computer scientists consider publications in high-quality conference proceedings more prestigious than journal publications. The additional notion that you have to actually travel to give a talk in order to publish would be even more shocking to the mathematicians, if it ever occurred to them.
I am helping run a conference series for both computer scientists and mathematicians: then the culture clash becomes apparent.
@johncarlosbaez why does an entire field of inquiry stick to such an inane rule? I suppose there can't be anything keeping each conference from unilaterally deciding to drop it?
You would think computer science conferences would be hybrid in person / virtual like many of the FLOSS conferences are, e.g LibrePlanet from the @fsf or perhaps FOSDEM, EmacsConf, DebConf
@zleap - you might think so, but no. By the way, I believe @vardi was mainly talking about academic computer science conferences, not industry-run meetings.
@johncarlosbaez@marcelsalathe I only agree to the extent that you can get fully immersed, committed, engagement for the entire duration of the event. I'm all for budgeting the number of flying holidays or even family visits people take – and I am HORRIFIED that flight numbers are back up to where they were pre COVID!! But diplomacy & science should be among the final things we shut down.
@j2bryson@marcelsalathe - I'm not advocating that we shut down academic travel. I'm advocating that computer scientists should not require people to travel in order to publish their papers in the most prestigious venues. Mathematicians don't do this. Physicists don't do this. This is a wholly unnecessary feature of computer science.
@johncarlosbaez@j2bryson agreed. With don’t do this in life science of medicine either. There are definitely great reasons to travel to scientific meetings! But shouldn’t be mandatory for publication.
@johncarlosbaez IIRC the problem with computer science (not my area) is that they recreated scholarly journals on top of conference proceedings, should were supposed to provide a more agile venue
@johncarlosbaez It all depends on what you think a conference is for. Several aspects came together in the past: getting to know each other’s work, getting to know each other in person, etc. The dissemination of work no longer needs conferences, true. But it’s very hard for beginning researchers to get started if there would be no conferences and simply online publishing. The excitement about new papers is mostly feeded by good presentations, not by simply throwing a pdf online.
@philipdutre - note I'm not talking about the question of whether conferences are still needed. I'm talking about how people are required to travel to conferences to publish their papers in the most prestigious computer science venues. It doesn't work that way in math, for example. It's a computer science thing.
@johncarlosbaez CS also has journals where one can publish papers without having to attend a conference. But it’s true that CS has a large emphasis on conferences, also historically grown.
@philipdutre - all the computer scientists I talk to say conference proceedings are more prestigious than journals - i.e., they help you more in your career. This is something that can change, but not very quickly.
@johncarlosbaez that or just the fact that the tech industry has a fetish of fancy conferences, mostly caused I suspect by tech companies having lots of money to throw away to make staff happy, and also to market themselves
They make extroverted tech workers happy because they get to go to a mini party paid by work. Meanwhile introverted and other neurodivergent people watch from the side as they realise half of the tech industry is based on this ecosystem where the most extroverted (and usually white guys) people can be recognised by being seen at events and looking important.
i think that's a much bigger issue than doing publications, the reason there are so many of those conferences and so frequent travel to them is because tech companies want to pay for them.
i have literally been told before that to progress further in my job roles I'd need to speak at more conferences with my company, and public speaking is honestly just a bit unsafe for some minorities
@bubbline - you're talking mainly about the tech industry, while I know more about academia, so that's what I was talking about. Since I'm not a computer scientist myself - just a mathematician who sometimes dabbles at fringes of computer science - I don't really understand the relationship between the most prestigious academic computer science conferences and the tech industry. I can easily imagine trade shows at prestigious academic computer science conferences, but I don't remember them at the few I've been to.
@johncarlosbaez Oh well I don't know about those ones then. To me computer science conferences and tech conferences sounds like more or less the same thing
@bubbline - They can be very different. Here are some papers in LICS, a conference on theoretical computer science. Nothing about specific programming languages or stuff people can buy!
Did it make sense to the people who couldn't get visas in the host country?
Did it make sense to the people who had home commitments they couldn't break?
Did it make sense to the people who had already decided that air travel was not sustainable?
Did it make sense to the people with physical or other barriers to travel or to large gatherings?
Climate change is an important reason for allowing online conferences, but it's only one of many.
@jupiter - you don't get it because it's so stupid you couldn't make it up. In computer science, it's considered more important to publish in "conference proceedings" than in journals. To publish in conference proceedings you upload your paper, and it gets refereed. Then, if your paper is accepted, they make you physically go to the conference and give a talk to get your paper published in the conference proceedings!
This is not at all how it works in math or physics. It's a computer science thing. (I don't know about all the other subjects.)
@johncarlosbaez Who set the rules? The publishers? The community at large? Academic system (e.g. University policies, or academic associates, or the like)? Or some combination of those?
@thebluewizard@johncarlosbaez Depends based on the conference. My educated guess (from having been on several conference PCs) is some combination of the conference's steering committee (often a long-standing body of officials elected with N-year terms, who steer the conference year after year), general chair, PC chair, and program committee (the latter three typically change each year).
So...on the one hand it's a pretty "local" decision -> should be "easy" to change. On the other hand, going against it would buck a long-term trend in the community.
If an ACM-sponsored conference tried to do this, would the ACM push back? (Or IEEE, SIAM, etc.) Society sponsorship comes with a whole range of benefits, money, help, and conveniences, etc. OTOH there are non-society-sponsored conferences such as CCC https://computationalcomplexity.org/.
That observation makes sense... but isn't it an argument to abolish conferences altogether? What is the point of having a zoom conference on X, rather than a "letters" type electronic journal on X?
@JorgeStolfi@johncarlosbaez A well-done online conference offers more than just reading the papers aloud. Sure, it doesn't offer meals and coffee and drinks. But it can offer many of the other scientific and networking benefits of an in-person conference.
(Key word here being "well-done"! Just because many online conferences are done poorly doesn't mean they all have to be.)
For a fraction of the cost, fraction of the CO2 budget.
And more accessible to people who cannot attend in-person, see: disabled, immunocompromised, less $ personally, university, or nationally, unable to take time off of work or family obligations to travel, visa issues, etc.
I cannot express it clearly, but in-person conferences also offer a lot more than online ones. I had many fruitful interactions at them that I would not have had through online ones. Just from sharing breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sightseeing together with people that I would not otherwise have tried to contact remotely. >>
But by having in-person-only conferences be primary means of networking and disseminating ideas, whole segments of the population are excluded from these activities.
@JorgeStolfi - yes, there are advantages to in-person conferences. But I am complaining about the practice of requiring computer scientists to travel to in-person conferences to publish their work in conference proceedings
@JorgeStolfi wrote: "That observation makes sense... but isn't it an argument to abolish conferences altogether?"
As @joshuagrochow points out, an online conference can be a very valuable thing. So can a hybrid conference where local people meet in person while remote people zoom in.
But note that I was not arguing to abolish long-distance travel to conferences, merely something far less: let's stop making this travel obligatory for publishing in the most prestigious venues!
Although I would argue further that we should at least provide the opportunity for people to participate in conferences - whether publication venue or not - without having to travel long distances. Indeed, many people cannot travel such long distances (eg, for reasons I outlined here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@joshuagrochow/110324340148484621).
@joshuagrochow - I agree it's also good to make conferences hybrid, and really think - repeatedly - about how to improve the experience at hybrid conferences.
@johncarlosbaez@JorgeStolfi@joshuagrochow Maybe it's possible for hybrid conferences to work well but I haven't seen it. Instead, the online sessions of hybrid conferences tend to be an excuse for everyone to tune out, more than they would at an all-online conference.
@11011110@johncarlosbaez@JorgeStolfi Hybrid shouldn't just mean "do the conference w/ business as usual but sometimes let someone Zoom in to give a remote talk". The analogy I heard once is: doing that is like saying you're going to try to make good vegetarian food by emulating a hotdog. (The best vegetarian food is often a well-prepared meal without meat, not trying to emulate meat.)
There are many more things hybrid could mean, and we've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities. If the things we've tried in the past didn't work well, the answer isn't to give up on hybrid - which is important for accessibility, inclusion, and the planet - but to apply our creativity to figure out better ways to do it.
@joshuagrochow@11011110@johncarlosbaez@JorgeStolfi CS conference organizers in the past 3 years had all the motivation, the available technology, knowledge and resources, and still failed to find a compelling format for hybrid conferences. Now that there is far less motivation, I don't expect that someone will find a working solution. Maybe in a few years some technology will enable this, but I'm skeptical.
I do think that CS should move away from the format of holding in-person conferences with proceedings (I don't think hybrid is the solution though). There are too many conferences, altogether too many papers are presented, and too many people travel. Often people travel just to present their work to other people who also came there not to listen, but also just to present their work. (Another thing is that in CS people publish too much in total, and this creates too much reviewing work and in effect reduces the time we have for research.) The solution could be to decouple conferences from publications, but I'm also skeptical this will happen anytime soon.
@szymtor@11011110@johncarlosbaez@JorgeStolfi Oh, also, just because most conferences did a not-great version of it doesn't mean they all did. I attended a few all-virtual and a few hybrid events that were actually really well done (though only a few!). The well-done ones are at least proof of concept.
@szymtor@11011110@johncarlosbaez@JorgeStolfi Being skeptical things won't change for the better becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let's be creative about improving things instead!
> conference organizers in the past 3 years had all the motivation, the available technology, knowledge and resources, and still failed to find a compelling format for hybrid conferences.
I disagree. Many were also struggling to adjust to a pandemic (in their teaching, their research, their personal lives), and many were hoping it would be over soon so they could get back to business as usual. And from that view, it was okay if they temporarily had stop-gap online conferences that were just kinda okay, because it would only be a year or two anyway. There was, in fact, very little motivation to do it really well. (Also evidenced by the number of events that simply chose to cancel rather than try to do something online.)
I'd be very curious about the experiences people have had with hybrid events. Surely there is some positive lesson that can be learnt from them. I'm wondering what specific decisions should the conference organizers (steering committee, chair) take. Should they encourage remote participation, and remote presentations? Should they invest in a social program for integrating remote participants? How to prevent zoom fatigue and loss of concentration, both in remote and in-person participants?
Of course, all this is only relevant assuming that we don't change our publication format, which we should do.
I think it's relevant even if we change our publication model. These issues are still relevant in other fields that publish in journals and use conferences to, well, confer.
@11011110@johncarlosbaez@JorgeStolfi@joshuagrochow Have you ever thought about the reasons why the hybrid format does not work for you? I have been involved, 15 years ago, with the construction of a video conferencing room. I have seen people, e.g. particle physicists, use such facilities with ease and great succes. In person and online combined to get the best of both worlds… Requires some effort but I have seen it happening 🤷♂️
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