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MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

mini-conf.github.io

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Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#11

Post by tito »

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

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#12

Post by srush »

walterbell wrote: post #10
srush wrote: post #3

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 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 tho…

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.

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#13

Post by srush »

smcnally wrote: post #7
srush wrote: post #3

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 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

Yeah :) we hacked in a lot of things last minute for ICLR. MiniConf is a clean 80% functionality / 20% code version of that codebase.

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#14

Post by chrisseaton »

formalsystem wrote: post #2

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 l…

> 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.

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#15

Post by dallathee »

tomcam wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The Journal of Open Source Software https://joss.theoj.org is a nice example of this.

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#16

Post by IanCal »

amelius wrote: post #4
formalsystem wrote: post #2

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 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.

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.

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#17

Post by tomcam »

dallathee wrote: post #15
tomcam wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty interesting idea. Can you give me some thoughts as to where it’s such a paper should be published?

The Journal of Open Source Software https://joss.theoj.org is a nice example of this.

Perfect, thank you very much.

Re: MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box

#19

Post by TeMPOraL »

IanCal wrote: post #16
amelius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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