MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
mini-conf.github.io
MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#2I 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.
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#3Hi 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!
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#4I 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 l…
> 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.
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#5This 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.
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#6I read the website and the readme, I don't understand what that is.
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#7Hi 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 contributo…
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
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#8I 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 l…
> 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.
That’s a pretty interesting idea. Can you give me some thoughts as to where it’s such a paper should be published?
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#9This 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 w…
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.
Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
#10Hi 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 contributo…
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?