NeurIPS 2020
NeurIPS 2020
https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2020
December 6th - December 12th, 2020
ABOUT
We are now just a few weeks away from the start of the conference and we are very excited to announce the schedule and how NeurIPS 2020 will unfold. Back in June, we made the difficult decision that NeurIPS would be a virtual event. We invited two Online Experience Chairs to join the organising committee, and began to plan for a virtual rather than a physical meeting.
There are several challenges when organizing a virtual event. First and foremost, presenters and attendees are spread around the world, and it is difficult to have them all come together at a time that is convenient for everybody. There are further issues related to basic accessibility in areas with low bandwidth internet connection and accessibility to apps that are not permitted in certain geographic areas. Another major challenge is the lack of social interaction, since one of the major drives to attend a conference is to meet people and exchange ideas, and the experience of virtual attendees can be impoverished in comparison. Finally, there are challenges related to improving the user interface of the communication tools and teaching people these tools, and to be able to release the schedule well in advance so that people have the warning they need to plan their attendance.
The NeurIPS 2020 organizers have worked very hard during the past several months to address these issues. Find out how here.
SCHEDULE
So, what does the schedule of the main program look like? You can see the details of the schedule here. Each session will start with a plenary keynote presentation followed by a live Q&A. The keynote speakers will be available for approximately an hour after their talk to answer questions using the internal chat, similar to ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions on reddit.
We then have a three-hour long multi-track oral session. Each track has a different theme (e.g., computer vision, statistical learning theory, etc.) and session chairs moderating the Q&A. The first hour highlights papers that were accepted for oral presentation. Each such paper has a 12-minute live streamed recording of the talk followed by a 3-minute live Q&A with the authors. The following two hours showcase papers accepted for a spotlight presentation. For these papers, we livestream batches of four papers, followed by a 10-minute long joint live Q&A for all the papers in the batch. The session then concludes with the poster presentation, hosted by Gather Town.
There are several Poster Towns, each hosting around 16 papers on a roughly similar theme. During the poster session, each attendee and author controls an avatar and can walk around these towns, visiting posters, chatting in hallways with other attendees, etc. Each town has clearly marked zones for each poster, with a “poster viewing area” and a “zoom call area”, and two presenter spots marked with stars. Poster presenters can interact with attendees directly in Gather Town in the poster viewing area if there are fewer than 4–5 participants; beyond this, presenters and attendees interested in the poster move to that poster’s Zoom call for smoother live video interaction.
REGISTRATION
We intend to keep the conference registration open until Monday December 7th 6pm PST. If you’d like to participate in the conference and workshops, make sure to register before then. This deadline is established to avoid a large surge of last-minute registrations, which can be problematic to the conference’s organization. You can register by going directly to this page.
Submitted by Regan Williams
on
NeurIPS 2020
https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2020
December 6th - December 12th, 2020
ABOUT
We are now just a few weeks away from the start of the conference and we are very excited to announce the schedule and how NeurIPS 2020 will unfold. Back in June, we made the difficult decision that NeurIPS would be a virtual event. We invited two Online Experience Chairs to join the organising committee, and began to plan for a virtual rather than a physical meeting.
There are several challenges when organizing a virtual event. First and foremost, presenters and attendees are spread around the world, and it is difficult to have them all come together at a time that is convenient for everybody. There are further issues related to basic accessibility in areas with low bandwidth internet connection and accessibility to apps that are not permitted in certain geographic areas. Another major challenge is the lack of social interaction, since one of the major drives to attend a conference is to meet people and exchange ideas, and the experience of virtual attendees can be impoverished in comparison. Finally, there are challenges related to improving the user interface of the communication tools and teaching people these tools, and to be able to release the schedule well in advance so that people have the warning they need to plan their attendance.
The NeurIPS 2020 organizers have worked very hard during the past several months to address these issues. Find out how here.
SCHEDULE
So, what does the schedule of the main program look like? You can see the details of the schedule here. Each session will start with a plenary keynote presentation followed by a live Q&A. The keynote speakers will be available for approximately an hour after their talk to answer questions using the internal chat, similar to ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions on reddit.
We then have a three-hour long multi-track oral session. Each track has a different theme (e.g., computer vision, statistical learning theory, etc.) and session chairs moderating the Q&A. The first hour highlights papers that were accepted for oral presentation. Each such paper has a 12-minute live streamed recording of the talk followed by a 3-minute live Q&A with the authors. The following two hours showcase papers accepted for a spotlight presentation. For these papers, we livestream batches of four papers, followed by a 10-minute long joint live Q&A for all the papers in the batch. The session then concludes with the poster presentation, hosted by Gather Town.
There are several Poster Towns, each hosting around 16 papers on a roughly similar theme. During the poster session, each attendee and author controls an avatar and can walk around these towns, visiting posters, chatting in hallways with other attendees, etc. Each town has clearly marked zones for each poster, with a “poster viewing area” and a “zoom call area”, and two presenter spots marked with stars. Poster presenters can interact with attendees directly in Gather Town in the poster viewing area if there are fewer than 4–5 participants; beyond this, presenters and attendees interested in the poster move to that poster’s Zoom call for smoother live video interaction.
REGISTRATION
We intend to keep the conference registration open until Monday December 7th 6pm PST. If you’d like to participate in the conference and workshops, make sure to register before then. This deadline is established to avoid a large surge of last-minute registrations, which can be problematic to the conference’s organization. You can register by going directly to this page.