ECIR 2020 – The participants

In terms of participation, ECIR 2020 generated a very positive interest in the community. After moving to online only, a total of 1021 registrations were received. Each day of the conference featured a different highlight attracting different participants: on the first day, there was a plenary keynote session across all workshops, on the second day we had the KSJ Award Keynote, on the third day the keynote was followed by the Best Paper Awards ceremony, and on the last day the panel was the highlight.

In terms of participation the following table breaks down the participation numbers into unique viewers in Zoom and YouTube Live, the maximum number of concurrent viewers in Zoom and YouTube Live, and the ECIR 2020 YouTube cumulative number of unique viewers in the first 20 days after the conference. Note that we are not counting the number of views of the pre-recorded short paper and demo paper views.

It is very comforting to see how ECIR 2020 was well received by the community: we had a peak number of unique viewers of 384 in Zoom and 221 in YouTube. Considering all the time zones, we are very happy with these figures. Also, the second day of the main conference (April 16) shows a trend that we confirmed from attendees’ feedback: a considerable number of people preferred to watch the talks on YouTube instead of Zoom.

 

		Zoom		YouTube
Date	Webinar	Unique viewers	Max concurrent viewers	Unique viewers (first 24 hours)	Max concurrent viewers	Cumulative unique viewers (first 20 days)
Apr 14	Webinar A	226	135	112	42	275
Apr 15	Webinar A	384	154	221	63	444
	Webinar B	235	78	130	29	256
	Shorts and demos	100	n.a.	n.a.	n.a.	n.a.
Apr 16	Webinar A	338	157	181	75	323
	Webinar B	184	68	164	29	323
	Shorts and demos	56	n.a.	n.a.	n.a.	n.a.
Apr 17	Webinar A	254	108	133	48	356
	Web. B – Industry day	101	29	61	47	326
	Shorts and demos	19	n.a.	n.a.	n.a.	n.a.