Less Exhausting, More Effective: Flipped Conferences*

If you want to get to business immediately, go to the 4^th paragraph please.

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I wrote the first draft of this like mid-August and wanted to post it shortly after. However, I kept delaying. It has been a tough year for the world in general. I, being a Turkish citizen, am like a non-life-threatening train-wreck since the coup attempt in Turkey (which happened midsummer). I still go to work regularly, act normal as much as possible, and do my best. But some days sleeping or getting out of bed is an extreme challenge. Terrible things happen in this world all the time, but some have the power to impact you more personally than others. If I consider my hopes and dreams as a small garden, some people burnt that garden completely midsummer. Now whenever I try to grow some new flowers there, some people kill them with a hammer.  It will take some time to restore that garden, but we are working on it. Naturally, being in this state turns something like posting about how to improve our conferences into a trivial or unimportant errand. Hence, my lame excuse to you for waiting too long to post this.

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On the way back home after SIGMOD this year, I met my Partner in Crime, Helena Kotthaus, for dinner in Palo Alto. She was in Bay Area that week for a conference as well and was going back to Dortmund in a couple of days. We were both extremely exhausted because of the conferences we attended. The main conclusion of that night was that we were officially not-young anymore. We intended to go to a bar after dinner, but instead, first stopped at an independent bookstore (Bell's Books) and hung out there till we were told that it was closing time, then went to have coffee at Coupa Café and discussed how we could change our conferences to be less exhausting and more effective.

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There has been various discussions about how we should change the way we run conferences in the recent years in our community. The premier conferences in our field have grown too big. It is very exhausting to keep track of all the papers and demos you are interested in as many sessions with many talks run in parallel, make sure everything goes well with your own presentation(s) or demo(s), and also meet/catch-up with people in your community.

While it might seem desirable to depart from few larger conferences and have many smaller workshops instead, the two serve different purposes. Workshops are extremely effective to gather people from a narrow research area. Since there is a single track in most workshops and the duration is typically shorter than the duration of a conference, the gurus of that research area stay in the workshop venue to follow majority of the talks. Therefore, workshops can actually provide higher recognition and networking opportunities, especially, for students. On the other hand, workshops tend to be organized by a smaller group of people, which may or may not change from one year to another. Therefore, they run into the danger of targeting the same group of people year after year sometimes excluding people from other fields or the newer generation.

Conferences bring together people from wider-variety of fields and prevent us from thinking that our own field is the center of the universe. They open up more opportunities for cross-field collaborations, and hence, more interesting research topics. In addition, they can teach us about fields that we do not have a good background on.

What can we do to make our conferences less exhausting and more effective then? We thought about adopting a structure similar to flipped classrooms, flipped conference, where the talks for accepted papers are given before the conference and the conference becomes a venue mainly for panels, discussions, demos, tutorials, and poster sessions.

The majority of the time in a conference goes to talks. In last SIGMOD, each session had seven papers to be presented. Even though the talk times were short, it was extremely hard to follow most of the talks in a session due to their density. At the end of the conference, one of the questions in the conference survey was whether to have talks for all papers or some specific subset of papers. We find it unacceptable to just pick a subset of papers for talks. Each accepted paper should have as equal opportunity as possible to be represented in a conference. Otherwise, they shouldn't be accepted. Therefore, we should focus on eliminating the burden of having too many talks even if many papers get accepted in a premier conference.

In a flipped conference, the authors of the accepted papers would record their talks before the conference and upload them to conference website (maybe as early as or shortly after the camera-ready deadline). The conference attendees can then watch these talks beforehand picking time-slots where they can better focus on the talks they are interested in or skim them during their flight to the conference location.** Then, they can mark the specific papers they would like to further dive in, read the paper itself in detail or target the authors of that paper for a fruitful discussion during the actual conference. One might say that lightning talks (as we do in some workshops) or short videos (as they do in SIGGRAPH) at the beginning of the conference would be sufficient for attendees to better navigate themselves in a conference. However, these don't always give a good idea about how interesting a paper is for you.

Giving the talks prior to the conference would be helpful for paper authors as well. The talks that are scheduled for the last day of the conference or in parallel with a talk from a prominent member of the community tend to get less attention. This way, we give each author, especially students, higher chances of being noticed.

The conference would be mainly composed of several poster and demo sessions that are less dense than the ones that we typically have, so that one can pay attention to all the posters and demos in a room. This would allow more interactive discussions among the conference attendees. In the meantime, the panels and tutorials would continue to take place as usual. One can also add discussion sessions on sub-fields in the community, where people discuss the accepted papers in that field. This would allow including more papers in a session, different sessions can have different number of papers, and some papers can be included in multiple sessions if they span multiple sub-fields.

Overall, flipped conferences can lead to a more interactive, less exhausting, and more beneficial conference experience for all attendees.

* I know that we are not really inventing this term. The idea of a flipped conference have been suggested by some folks already (e.g., here, here, here, ...), even though the implementation details are different from suggestion to suggestion.

** Initially, I suggested uploading these videos just a week before the conference would be enough. However, My Twin Sister, Duygu Ceylan, thinks that people might not allocate time to watch videos before the conference. Therefore, I thought uploading them earlier (like closer to camera ready deadline) might be better. Though, she confirmed that the premier conferences in the field of computer vision and graphics (her fields) are also quite exhausting and sometimes papers can get stale by the time they are presented at the conference. 

When Your Country Breaks You

“Your country raised you, your country fed you, and just like any other country it will break you.”

Gogol Bordello – Your Country

I have never been proud of being Turkish*. I have never been ashamed of it either. I did not ask or work for being Turkish. It was given to me at birth. I do not understand how people can be proud of their nationality. If there is an equivalent of a grinch for independence days, I am that person. I find it weird seeing too many national flags around and the proud faces of the people carrying them. Nevertheless, I do my best to respect the people who feel proud of their nationality (as long as they don’t diminish other nationalities).

I wish I could say that I simply don’t care about belonging to any nation. However, it is not that simple. I lived the first 21 years of my life in Turkey. Being Turkish is a big part of who I am. It is in the accent I have while speaking English. It is in the way I interact with people. It is in the food I eat. It is in the jokes I laugh at. I can’t ignore it. I live with it every day. As a result, it affects me when shit goes down in Turkey, like it did about three weeks ago.

I have never felt as hopeless in my life as I did on July 16^th. When you are ill with high fever, the fever would be the main thing you feel. The day after the fever, however, you start being more aware of every aching bone in your body. July 15^th was the day of the fever, it was the day of the coup attempt. We were all trying to understand what the heck was going on while constantly texting/talking with the loved ones and hoping that nobody dies on the streets. July 16^th was the day after the fever. The coup attempt was prevented, but we still had no clue what really went down and the overall mess of the whole thing started to sink in. The situation was, as the saying goes in Turkey, a stick where both sides were covered with shit. I barely slept the night before, my head was killing me, and my body was resisting any type of food or movement. I just sat on the couch looking emptily at the walls of my apartment.

Toward noon, I texted Greek bro. He was taking his kids to the park, he said I was welcome to join them. I went there immediately. I thought seeing the tiny beautiful faces of his kids might restore some hope in me. It didn’t, but at least the two hours I spent with them made me stop thinking about what happened and smile a bit. Plus, he made me eat nutritious food as usual. Then, I met Twin Sister. She looked as worn down as I did. We aimlessly walked around talking about the downward spiral state of our country. It was really nice to talk to someone who can really understand your desperate state and who won’t be excited to immediately dive into the political analysis of the situation. 

The following week was a mess. I gave myself several panic attacks just by reading the news about my country or thinking about the possible future of my country alone at home. I even thought having a husband would be useful for these types of situations in terms of not being alone, but then immediately abandoned the thought. I kept wondering how my parents went through three coups in a sane way. I barely concentrated on the things I was supposed to do. I had to pretend that everything was ok at work place while the non-Turkish people around me kept on living their lives the same way**. I was slightly happy that I was off next week since I could then stop pretending that I was ok or I would be among people who could help me forget what was going on in my country even for a short period of time. 

Here we are now. Three weeks passed since the coup attempt. I won’t pretend that I am all recovered. This shit has a long way to go. But life whips you in the back constantly to move forward. And sometimes it is our only option, so “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

* Here, by “being Turkish”, I mean “coming from Turkey”. I do not mean anything that is related to ethnicity. If we dig my ethnic roots, or anyone’s ethnic roots in Turkey, we would run into the danger of falling into a very deep pit.

** I am well aware that this is not an issue specific to me in our community. I work in an environment where people are of a lot of different nationalities. I am sure many of them feel like this on some days.

Introverts’ Guide to Conferences

I am an out and proud introvert. However, I was around 25 when I was finally OK with being an introvert, because majority of the world encourages people to be extroverted and treats introverted people as if they have a disease.

I don’t know how many times I have been told “talk more”, “be louder”, “be more aggressive”, “be more confident”, “don’t be timid”, … Before I made my peace with being an introvert, every time when I heard such an advice, I became either the-paranoid-android-Marvin-level sad or the-incredible-Hulk-level angry. And to make it clear, I never got angry with the people who said these to me, because I knew they cared about me and had the best intentions in mind. Instead I got angry with myself for not being louder, aggressive enough, or more verbal.

In summer 2012, I was a summer intern at Oracle labs in Bay Area. Oracle labs provided its interns with accommodation during the internship, and they assigned me with a German (half Egyptian) girl, Helena, as roommates. She immediately became one of my favorite partners in crime. Shortly after we became roommates, I mentioned her how I felt when people advise me to “talk more”. She told me “I am surprised by that. Since we started living together, we have been talking almost non-stop. I think you talk fine.” From that summer on, I started to be less and less harsh to myself about being an introvert.

Now no matter how OK you are with being an introvert, it still doesn’t work to your advantage on several occasions. One of them is conferences. As a researcher, attending conferences are an essential part of your job, and it is actually one of my favorite parts of my job. Conferences are the places where you make yourself known to your research community. To give you a clue on how important this is, while trying to schedule after-PhD-life-job interviews, I directly emailed the people who knew me from conferences rather than applying to jobs over company websites. I don’t think I would have been invited to as many interviews as I had, if these people hadn't known me from those conferences.

To be able to make yourself noticed at a conference you either should have research findings that are ground-breaking in your field or mingle with as many people as possible in the conference. Very few of us actually achieve the former, whereas many of us have to do the latter. I have nothing against mingling with people, I actually like it. However, I am inherently bad at it due to being an introvert:
(1) I am terrible at small talk (even though I became a bit less terrible at it during my PhD),
(2) I don’t like to talk too much anyway (unless I am talking about Gilmore Girls or Irvine Welsh),
(3) crowds that I have to pay attention to drain my energy (whereas crowds in the streets of a city like Istanbul energizes me), and
(4) when there are too many people around, I switch to observer mode (rather than talker mode).

Overall, I cannot claim that I did a great job in terms of mingling with people at conferences. However, I tried my best and while trying my best the thing that worked to my advantage was giving as many talks as possible in conferences. The first talk I gave at a conferences was for a paper where I was a second author. Normally, it is more traditional for the first author to give the talk for a paper. When my advisor and Greek bro (the first author) approached me to give the talk for the paper, it made me a little bit scared. But I thought “these people are a lot more senior than I am and if they didn’t think I could do this, they wouldn’t ask me”.  So I gave that talk. After seeing that talk one of the prominent members of our community invited me to give a talk at an important workshop in my sub-field, which eventually gave me an exposure and mingling chance that wouldn’t be possible otherwise at that stage of my PhD.

So the introverts, please do not turn down a chance to give a talk at a conference. Spend time to polish those talks to make sure they are good quality, especially in the early days of your careers. While giving good quality talks is a valid advice for pretty much everyone in the early days of their research careers, especially for introverts, I think it is the easiest way to mingle with people that you don’t know from before. Because after those talks, you will have a little bit less pressure on yourself while awkwardly trying to catch attention of the people you are interested in at a conference. After those talks, many people will come to you instead to ask questions about your work (so no small talk), and from there on you have their attention, do whatever you like with that attention.

And the extroverts, I just want to say the following:

Some of you I really love very much and it makes me happy to hear you talk anytime you like with your beautiful loud voices.

Some of you I envy because you make me think that how easier it would be for me in a crowd if I could just act the way you do.

And finally some of you just make me want to say “shut the fuck up, you are hurting my brain”, but I won’t, because inherently I am not very aggressive either, so I might just start gently arguing with you, or decide to minimize contact with you, or simply avoid you instead.

If you would like to gain more information about introverts vs. extroverts, you can simply google “Susan Cain”. Here is the first episode of my favorite video series on this issue, which is based on Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. She also gave a TED talk.