Collaborative Research: RAPID: Virtual Conference Platform

The spread of COVID-19 is forcing physical academic conferences to suddenly move online. Since conferences are critical to the fabric of many scientific and engineering communities, making their online versions as good as they can be -- especially, doing everything we can to replace the unstructured, serendipitous conversations and connections that are the lifeblood of conferences -- is of the utmost importance. But the virtual conferences that have happened so far have not been very successful at replicating this "hallway discussions." The goal of this project is to rapidly develop a Web-based virtual conference platform, dubbed Clowdr, that will support several modalities for synchronous interaction among participants while alleviating the integration problems reported by participants at recent events. In the longer term, Clowdr-based online meetings will become an integral part of the conference ecosystem, supporting efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of scientific research coordination and improve diversity, accessibility, and fairness. The immediate focus for the project is the integration of all the necessary technological pieces for a successful conference in a single, easy-to-use web interface. A first version of this platform will be ready by the end of June 2020, and it will be continually improved until the end of the year based on participant and organizer feedback from a series of conferences. The platform will include areas for watching live talks along with chat and question-and-answer components, an area for watching past live talks with audience awareness, a poster and demo space where participants can join and easily switch, a lobby area where participants can start ad-hoc text and video chats, and other features. The platform will be used later as the basis for research on human-social interactions in conference settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.