Virtual Conferences

Abstract

For the past 40 years, research communities have embraced a culture that relies heavily on physical meetings of people from around the world: we present our most important work in conferences, we meet our peers in conferences, and we even make life-long friends in conferences. Also at the same time, a broad scientific consensus has emerged that warns that human emissions of greenhouse gases are warming the earth. For many of us, travel to conferences may be a substantial or even dominant part of our individual contribution to climate change. A single round-trip flight from Paris to New Orleans emits the equivalent of about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2e) per passenger, which is a significant fraction of the total yearly emissions for an average resident of the US or Europe. Moreover, these emissions have no near-term technological fix, since jet fuel is difficult to replace with renewable energy sources. In this talk, I want to first raise awareness of the conundrum we are in by relying so heavily in air travel for our work. I will present some of the possible solutions that go from adopting small, incremental changes to radical ones. The talk focuses one of the radical alternatives: virtual conferences. The technology for them is almost here and, for some time, I have been part of one community that organizes an annual conference in a virtual environment. Virtual conferences present many interesting challenges, some of them technological in nature, others that go beyond technology. Creating truly immersive conference experiences that make us feel "there" requires attention to personal and social experiences at physical conferences. Those experiences need to be recreated from the ground up in virtual spaces. But in that process, they can also be rethought to become experiences not possible in real life.