[agents] Format of AAMAS - survey

[Michael Winikoff]

Dear AAMAS community,

The IFAAMAS board will be discussing the future format of the AAMAS conference in its next meeting on the 14th of November. Some additional context is at the end of this message.

In order to inform this meeting with the views of the community, it would be great if you could take a few minutes to complete a survey within the next week.

It would be particularly useful to hear from people who were not able to attend AAMAS in London.

Survey link (note: the survey will be open until 4am, 14th November, GMT)
https://forms.gle/XiuW7aBJXwqWTSXL6

Thank you!

Michael Winikoff
IFAAMAS President



Additional context:

Over the last few years COVID travel restrictions saw a move to online conferences (e.g. AAMAS 2020, 2021 and 2022). From these experiences we learned that online conferences can work surprisingly well for some aspects (e.g. presentations, questions, keynotes).

We also saw that online conferences have significant advantages in accessibility. People who normally find it hard to attend conferences face-to-face (e.g. due to caring responsibilities, cost, visa, etc.) were able to attend online conferences, and some conferences saw dramatic increases in attendance, including from under-represented groups.

Furthermore, online conferences, especially those with a globe-spanning community, such as AAMAS, offer significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

However, at least the way they were done, online conferences did not work well for the more informal social interactions that are so important, especially for early-career scholars.

The question we now face is whether we should continue with a pre-COVID face-to-face conference format, or instead look at hybrid or fully online formats.

Unfortunately, hybrid conferences are quite hard to get to work, and we don’t have good models for how to get the benefits of both online and face-to-face without the disadvantages of both (including high costs!). Hybrid conferences tend to make remote participants “second class citizens”. They create incentives for participants to not attend, and for institutions to not fund participants to attend, since an online option is available. This in turn diminishes the value of attending face-to-face.

So, there is no easy answer: each option has strengths and weaknesses.

One thing to consider is whether changing the conference format and structure can improve things. For instance, why don’t we use a flipped conference mode that allows us to make the most of the conference time for interaction?  What if we provided a scheduling platform to facilitate meeting people? This would be given your availability (and, for online events, timezone), and the people you want to meet during the conference (which could include “an author of this paper”, “this person”, “this group of people”, or “people I have collaborated with based on my DBLP profile”). It would then set up meetings. There could also be a "random meeting" feature to mimic the opportunistic interactions that occur when people share a physical space.




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