[HN Gopher] MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
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MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
Author : maurits
Score : 87 points
Date : 2020-05-23 11:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mini-conf.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mini-conf.github.io)
| thesehands wrote:
| The T-Sne view for papers is a killer feature. Loved it for ICLR,
| glad more will be able to use it. Thank You!
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is lovely. I like both the approach and the output.
| lazerwalker wrote:
| This looks great! I'd love to see some of the fantastic context
| in your lovely Twitter thread included on the website.
|
| As someone who's currently in industry rather than academia, I
| interpreted "virtual conference" as "a Twitch or YouTube stream,
| and likely some sort of chat space like a Discord". That landing
| page does a great job of explaining the technical underpinnings
| of your tool, but doesn't actually explain what sort of
| site/services the web server actually serves!
|
| Even just including the GIF from the beginning of your Twitter
| thread would be super helpful.
| srush wrote:
| Thanks for the comment! Updated the readme. During the
| conference we ran we did integrate chat and video tools
| (Rocket.chat, slido, slideslive). This is really just the glue
| to pull those parts together.
| dgellow wrote:
| I read the website and the readme, I don't understand what that
| is.
| formalsystem wrote:
| I love this. Conferences and the publishing business are
| extremely scammy IMO. There's no reason you need to pay anyone
| $500 to host a pdf.
|
| What researchers want is discoverability and credit. Some
| researchers are already famous and own their own distribution via
| arxiv or Twitter but for new researchers publishing a paper at a
| prestigious conference is a way to bootstrap a reputation.
|
| If you really wanna get rid of large publishers what you really
| need to solve is discoverability and you can solve it with a
| combination of virtual mini conferences and callouts on Twitter
| and Hacker News.
|
| I've gotten some of the best constructive feedback on my blog
| posts from Hacker News directly, I don't see how that's different
| from peer review. I don't find it very likely that someone would
| even be willing to give me feedback unless they themselves are
| already subject matter experts.
|
| But really the impact of a piece of computer science research is
| directly correlated to how many people directly use the OSS
| inspired by the research. People in industry know this, what's
| left is is for tenure committees to also take software impact
| into account.
| amelius wrote:
| > People in industry know this, what's left is is for tenure
| committees to also take software impact into account.
|
| Software should be citable. You can make it so by publishing a
| paper describing the software. Usually the authors then request
| anybody who uses the software in their research to cite that
| paper.
| tomcam wrote:
| That's a pretty interesting idea. Can you give me some
| thoughts as to where it's such a paper should be published?
| dallathee wrote:
| The Journal of Open Source Software https://joss.theoj.org
| is a nice example of this.
| tomcam wrote:
| Perfect, thank you very much.
| IanCal wrote:
| You can publish the code itself somewhere like zenodo or
| figshare (disclaimer, I work for Digital Science) and have it
| citable like that. No need to publish a paper on it. This is
| how I've published code before.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yup. For instance, nyan-mode for Emacs has had a DOI for
| years now: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.164185.
|
| (No reason for doing it, I was just curious if I could.)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I don't see how that's different from peer review
|
| A lot of people think they're subject-matter experts and may
| comment on your article, but may be mistaken.
|
| In all the peer review processes I've been involved in
| reviewers review each others reviews before they go out. Other
| reviewers will challenge a bad or misleading review. If there
| aren't people who know enough about the subject they'll go out
| and find someone who is.
|
| You could literally do this process in a web interface that
| looked like Hacker News, but they already pretty much do.
|
| I think if you built your dream review system... I think you
| may find it looks pretty much like what we have already.
|
| > callouts on Twitter and Hacker News
|
| Sounds like a popularity contest.
| srush wrote:
| Hi HN, I'm the developer (@srush_nlp). This was made for ICLR a
| deep learning conference we ran last month. We couldn't find any
| tools to do the things we wanted so we went a bit rogue and built
| it ourselves. There's a bunch of ML bits in it as well. Here's
| the back story
| https://twitter.com/srush_nlp/status/1253786329575538691?s=1... .
|
| I'm a professor, not a software engineer, so happy for any
| comments or contributors!
| smcnally wrote:
| Thank you for cleaning up the improvisational work you did for
| your team's own needs and making this available to everyone.
|
| The mini-conf tour is a good overview for generalized
| application. Your ICLR pages are great examples of mini-conf in
| action, e.g.
|
| https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/workshops_8.html
| https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/papers.html?filter=keywords
| srush wrote:
| Yeah :) we hacked in a lot of things last minute for ICLR.
| MiniConf is a clean 80% functionality / 20% code version of
| that codebase.
| walterbell wrote:
| This is both usable and has a unique "vibe", in a time when
| many virtual events have struggled to capture the character and
| human essence of their F2F events. Congratulations and thank
| you for releasing the code!
|
| A few production questions.
|
| 1. Sync/playback is relatively fast. Are you using a streaming
| server or web-hosted video files?
|
| 2. On pages with video & slides, how are the two frames
| synchronized, e.g. are those two synchronized video streams
| with known timecodes for slide changes, or is the slide frame
| showing static images that are synced with video timecodes?
|
| 3. Did you chose Python because of existing code that you
| wanted to reuse?
|
| 4. Which existing software was closest to meeting your needs,
| and what were the shortcomings that motivated miniconf?
| srush wrote:
| Thanks! If you are interested more about the event here was a
| podcast https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/episodes/iclr-
| accessible-... and blog post
| https://medium.com/@iclr_conf/gone-virtual-lessons-from-
| iclr...
|
| Answers:
|
| 1 + 2. We used https://slideslive.com/ an external conference
| provider. They do a lot of optimizing behind the scenes, and
| have that cool sync.
|
| 3. Python is the de facto standard language in ML. We use it
| for everything. We thought about js/react or something, but
| we didn't think it would be maintainable.
|
| 4. A lot of the existing software assumed there would be a
| physical event or even worse tried to pretend there was a
| virtual physical event. We wanted something that was async-
| first, desktop-oriented, and very simple to browse.
| tito wrote:
| Sci-fi legend Kim Stanley Robinson was a keynote speaker at our
| virtual conference!! I guarantee that wouldn't of happened if we
| were in person.
|
| Virtual conferences are terrific. I just helped host the
| AirMiners conference [1] on carbon removal on May 13. Because it
| was a virtual conf we were able to achieve top speakers,
| international attendees, and just seemed so much more effective.
| (KSR's keynote is here: https://youtu.be/9Pw0n0CeK0k)
|
| It's going to be an uphill battle to get me to attend an in
| person conference again.
|
| [1] http://airminers.org
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