Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvag and Vinay Setty have authored a detailed review of the very successful ECIR 2022 event held in Stavanger, Norway, in April. The review, which is published in the June 2022 issue of SIGIR Forum, runs to 12 pages.
To quote from the Conclusion
“One of the biggest organizational challenges was dealing with uncertainty—first, whether the conference can be held in a physical format at all, then, whether there would be enough attendees to break even, and finally, to scale up everything on short notice in order to accommodate all the late registrants. Another set of challenges has to do with the hybrid format, where many open issues remain. It is critical to realize and accept that there are differences between in-person and remote participation, and that it is simply not possible to provide the same experience for those that are attending online. Most importantly, and quite understandably, in-person participants much prefer interacting with each other than to go on Zoom calls to talk to remote attendees. Therefore, we should perhaps accept that there are clear advantages to in-person participation, while at the same time strive at our best to ensure the best remote experience. We hope that our experience report can help future conference organizers with the planning of hybrid events”
This is perhaps a good point to slot in a very concise overview of conference structures from Associate Professor Max Wilson at the University of Nottingham.
Martin White