SIGEVOlution

Due to the health and safety hazard introduced by Covid-19 and the measures of governments around the world restricting travel and large gatherings, most conferences in 2020 have decided to go virtual. This includes the recently held EvoStar conferences, as well as the upcoming Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), which many SIGEVO Members are attending regularly.

The following article will attempt to summarize the advantages, disadvantages and challenges that come with such virtual conferences from an attendee’s perspective. As they are collected from discussions and personal opinions, take them with a grain of salt, as every experience on a conference is different.

Technical Challenges

The core technical challenge that a virtual conference has to deal with is how to organize video presentations, both on the smaller scale of workshop / dedicated sessions for talks and on the much larger scale of keynotes and assemblies. The EvoStar organizers handled this via two different systems.

Zoom was utilized to manage the different sessions that the EvoStar conferences cover. The rooms were mostly co-managed by two people that dealt with letting attendees into the rooms, moderating the talks and reading chat questions from the audience to the presenters. This system made it easy to communicate with presenters without introducing background noises from a multitude of microphones. In addition, it enabled the presenter to concentrate on the questions instead of having to deal with multiple people talking over each other at the same time. The votes for best paper were also handled via the Zoom internal voting tool, which worked well.

Several attendees had issues with large delays between audio and video, making it hard to follow the presenter’s elaborations. This might be a symptom of underlying issues such as local internet connectivity or low-end PCs or just the internet use in the time zone with modern streaming services introducing a heavy burden on regional networks.

The keynotes were presented via YouTube, which is a great choice for larger keynotes as the platform is widespread, has dedicated support for large scale streaming and enabled anyone in the world to attend live, or watch the keynotes later.

A technical challenge on the attendees’ side is their own internet connection. Especially for people living in rural areas a bad connection meant having bad video, audio or even dropping out of presentations for some time. For presenters the issue increased when sharing their screen, for which also a sufficiently powerful PC is necessary. As a whole, this is an issue during home office periods, but should be negligible for when people can attend via their universities or workplaces, which traditionally have higher-grade internet connectivity and devices available.

Organizational Challenges

There were many organizational challenges “behind the scenes” that many attendees have been only tangentially aware of. The pandemic hit hard and fast, forcing organizers to quickly find alternative solutions and deal with venues, publishers, catering and the dozens of other people and organizations making a conference work in the end. The fast and excellent problem solving, communication and execution speaks volumes of the organizer’s dedication, which made EvoStar and will make other upcoming conferences a great success.

The attendees had it relatively easy with the only challenge of being there and being on time. For EvoStar, which is traditionally, very Europe-centric this was not as much of an issue as it will be for GECCO or the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), which usually enjoy diverse audiences from all over the world. EvoStar and GECCO have chosen to hold the conference in the time zone where the conference was originally supposed to take place. This is convenient for some and requires many to change their sleeping habits while not living in that time zone. The disadvantage being that adjustment becomes harder.