Towards Democratizing and Automating Online Conferences: Lessons from the Neuromatch Conferences

Titipat Achakulvisut; Tulakan Ruangrong; Patrick Mineault; Tim P Vogels; Megan A K Peters; Panayiota Poirazi; Christopher Rozell; Brad Wyble; Dan F M Goodman; Konrad Paul Kording

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2021.01.007

Towards Democratizing and Automating Online Conferences: Lessons from the Neuromatch Conferences

Trends Cogn Sci. 2021 Apr;25(4):265-268. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.01.007. Epub 2021 Feb 16.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Electronic address: titipata@seas.upenn.edu.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand.
³ Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
⁴ The Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria.
⁵ Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
⁶ Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB), Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Greece.
⁷ School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
⁸ Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Psychology, Penn State University, State College, PA, USA. Electronic address: bwyble@gmail.com.
⁹ Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK. Electronic address: d.goodman@imperial.ac.uk.
¹⁰ Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Electronic address: koerding@gmail.com.

PMID: 33608214
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.01.007

Abstract

Legacy conferences are costly and time consuming, and exclude scientists lacking various resources or abilities. During the 2020 pandemic, we created an online conference platform, Neuromatch Conferences (NMC), aimed at developing technological and cultural changes to make conferences more democratic, scalable, and accessible. We discuss the lessons we learned.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Humans
Pandemics*