SigKDD2020 and EuroPar2020

This week went with 2 virtual conferences - SigKDD and EuroPar. Due to their timezone differences, I was able to attend them both. EuroPar was in the morning, whereas SigKDD was in the afternoon. Consequently, I spent 7 am - 9 pm with these conferences for most of Sunday to Friday. I skipped most of the EuroPar workshops as they were 3 am - 7 am my time. However, all these videos are now in YouTube. Most of the conference videos were initially unlisted. But they will eventually be properly listed.

EuroPar used Slack and Zoom Webinar. SigKDD used Zoom webinar, Zoom meetings, Whova, and VFairs. There were 'introduction" threads on Slack and Whova where we all introduced ourselves. I was attending as an audience. I did not present a paper. Especially those who presented papers received a considerable interaction (Q&A and suggestions) through these channels.

Prof. Manuela M Veloso presenting her robots and AI for financial services. My most favorite session at the #KDD2020 so far!

This week, attending sessions from both #EuroPar2020 and@kdd_news.

Also nice to see papers from my colleagues from @InescID and @KAUST_News at #EuroPar. pic.twitter.com/HzX3OBUNGm

— Pradeeban (@pradeeban) August 27, 2020

Online conferences have a long way to go before they can reach their expected heights though. For instance, many times there were problems with the audio or screensharing during the conference. There was a racist sexist zoombomber once during the KDD session. There was a token registration fee from KDD and the event was free to attend for EuroPar. I believe, ideally the virtual conferences should be free for audience. You may charge the authors for the publication fee, of course. Also, I think, the zoom meetings should be configured *not* to enable everyone's cam and mic by default, especially in a large-scale event such as SigKDD. Every time someone joined we heard some disturbances in zoom meetings.

SIGKDD 2021 Goes Hybrid!

SIGKDD2021 aims to be a hybrid conference, with on-site event in Singapore with online streaming with the same or similar apps for those who cannot travel to Singapore. These are all assuming everything goes well with the COVID-19 situation, of course. Indeed, a virtual conference will never come close to the feeling of an in-person conference. But in 2015, when I had a workshop paper in SIGKDD. However, my Australian visa got delayed and I couldn't participate - my friend who lives in Sydney presented the paper on behalf of me. As such, a hybrid conference can bring the best of the both worlds. Who can afford to and like to present their paper in-person can fly to the conference on-site, whereas others can present online. This is better than a random colleague presenting the paper on-behalf of the authors and suffering to answer the questions. This will also encourage researchers to conferences regardless of the location. Often, we are forced to choose conferences in proximity, due to visa, funding limitations, and travel restrictions.

#KDD2021 goes hybrid: a combination of onsite (Singapore) and online conference.

Challenging, yet interesting, times ahead.

Finally @kdd_news #KDD2020 comes to an end. pic.twitter.com/hWTEcGlNzn

— Pradeeban (@pradeeban) August 28, 2020

EuroPar 2021 Goes Lisboa!

EuroPar2021 will be in Lisboa, organized by Tecnico-ULisboa (my university) and INESC-ID Lisboa (my research lab). I am so tempted to submit my paper, hoping the travel restrictions and COVID-19 will be history by then.

Bonus points on why one must submit their paper to #EuroPar2021 - It is organized by my university @istecnico and research lab @InescID in #Lisboa.#EuroPar2020 comes to an end! See you next year, #EuroPar. #Lisbon #Portugal. https://t.co/RacPXPUT2H

— Pradeeban (@pradeeban) August 28, 2020

EuroPar 2020

Joining the EuroPar sessions remotely

EuroPar is a top conference in parallel and distributed processing. As such, it contains topics that are directly relevant to me from my MSc/PhD days. There were so many interesting papers. 

I attended the below sessions in full or in part.
1) Cluster, Cloud and Edge Computing
2) Scheduling and Load Balancing
3) Best Paper and Best Artifact
4) Data Management, Analytics and Machine Learning
5) Parallel and Distributed Programming, Interfaces, and Languag
6) Theory and Algorithms for Parallel and Distributed Processing
7) Keynotes

KDD 2020

The papers in KDD used to focus on data mining and patter recognition more years ago. Now, everything has turned to deep learning. Especially, this year, with the COVID19, there were more sessions focused on COVID-19. Even some presentations that are not really related to COVID-19, made some reference to COVID-19. That is the impact of COVID-19 on the world.

 

Interestingly, one conference organizer mentioned how there were more participants in all the sessions that had "deep learning" in their names, whether workshops, tutorials, or the main sessions. Listed below, are a subset of the sessions that I attended:

1) Learning with Small Data
2) Fairness in ML for Healthcare
3) KDD 2020 Opening Ceremony and Keynote Address
4) Hands On Tutorials: Put Deep Learning to work: Accelerate Deep Learning through AWS EC2 and ML Services
5) KDD 2020 Opening Ceremony and Keynote Address
6) Research Track Oral Presentations: Parallel and Distributed Learning and System
7) Late-breaking Session: Emerging Data Science Problems in the Age of COVID-19
8) [DSHealth] 2020 KDD workshop on Applied data science in Healthcare: Trustable and Actionable AI for Healthcare
9) Research Track Oral Presentations: Big Data and Large Scale Methods
10) Plenary Session: Diversity & Inclusion Closing Remarks by Latifa Jackson
11) KDD 2020 Closing Ceremony - Keynote Address by Allesssandro Vespignani and Closing Remarks