The lead time for workshops at places like IPAM, ICERM, etc. used to be *years* but they (well, ICERM) instituted some "hot topics" workshops that had shorter turn around times. And, the NSF used to occasionally include funding for local workshops on larger grants (like the CCF Medium). I have no idea if any of that stuff still exists.
What I really want is an all bot portion of one of these big conferences like ICML or NeurIPS (bot A writes paper, bot B referees, bots C - G form program committee, bot H delivers talk/video/poster) and an all human artisanal part in which humans write, review, and present (but the PC has to do the paper presentation). Everyone gets a line on their CV but the humans have fun.
Yup. There are AI agents to carry out research, to write the paper, and then the poster! And I know folks are using bots to review papers. Why not just send your agent to the poster session and be done with things?! (Agent != grad student)
I've been fairly critical of workshops at robotics conferences moving towards miniconference formats where many participants are focused more on self-promotion than on having an open, collaborative format to really push forward the science.
Here's some of my critiques and previously proposed solutions in the context of your proposal.
1) The biggest issue has been popular, "famous" speakers attending multiple workshops and not sticking around to actually engage with other talks and student work. RSS has decreased this issue by limiting folks to a maximum of 2 workshops, but 1 workshop still typically loses out under this rule.
Having these microconferences be essentially standalone would help fix this. If several related microconferences were co-located, some strong encouragement to engage with the entire meeting / strict rule to not present at two of them would still need to be enforced to address this.
2) The friend / cronyism / popularity contest issue is still a big issue.. Attempts to ensure geographic, gender, and career-seniority diversity have worked somewhat, but still it seems like the same folks get asked a lot and others doing good work are ignored. Given the self-promotion angle that many people take to these meetings, we suggested a few years ago that workshop organizers ask the senior person (faculty, industry researcher) to nominate students or postdocs to present in their stead or jointly with them to help these folks get more attention and credit for the work they're doing. I'm happy to see this suggestion has persisted somewhat in subsequent years and I've attended several joint faculty-student talks in the past couple years.
3) Along these lines, I would advocate that for many microconferences / workshops the topic call should be given before announcing / confirming any speakers (half the speakers?) and let those interested apply and be given equal time to invited talks, instead of the current standard of submitted short papers that get relatively short presentations relative to the big invited names.
4) The most batshit insane thing that's been taking over recently is people with papers in the main conference submitting essentially the exact same work to be presented at the workshop in order to get more attention, especially if the main conference presentation is just a poster or lightning talk. The most upsetting version of this was someone not even bothering to show up for their short workshop presentation and letting a video play even when they had presented at the main conference. I hear this is also very prominent at CVPR. Here again, not collocating with bigger conferences would help.
5) One big benefit of collocation is of course broader participation, especially by students.
I don't know if this was mentioned already, but PLSC and WeRobot have a format very similar to the "not so royal society". Participants submit working papers/abstracts. Each paper gets three readers. At the (un)conference the author(s) sit in a room with the readers who discuss the paper. Others can also weigh in. The authors generally don't speak unless to clarify or answer questions. This proves to be immensely useful for refining work prior to an actual submission to law review. and it's a great way to learn about others' work
The lead time for workshops at places like IPAM, ICERM, etc. used to be *years* but they (well, ICERM) instituted some "hot topics" workshops that had shorter turn around times. And, the NSF used to occasionally include funding for local workshops on larger grants (like the CCF Medium). I have no idea if any of that stuff still exists.
What I really want is an all bot portion of one of these big conferences like ICML or NeurIPS (bot A writes paper, bot B referees, bots C - G form program committee, bot H delivers talk/video/poster) and an all human artisanal part in which humans write, review, and present (but the PC has to do the paper presentation). Everyone gets a line on their CV but the humans have fun.
Hah are you suggesting the current NeurIPS is polluted with bots? (I agree)
Yup. There are AI agents to carry out research, to write the paper, and then the poster! And I know folks are using bots to review papers. Why not just send your agent to the poster session and be done with things?! (Agent != grad student)
I've been fairly critical of workshops at robotics conferences moving towards miniconference formats where many participants are focused more on self-promotion than on having an open, collaborative format to really push forward the science.
Here's some of my critiques and previously proposed solutions in the context of your proposal.
1) The biggest issue has been popular, "famous" speakers attending multiple workshops and not sticking around to actually engage with other talks and student work. RSS has decreased this issue by limiting folks to a maximum of 2 workshops, but 1 workshop still typically loses out under this rule.
Having these microconferences be essentially standalone would help fix this. If several related microconferences were co-located, some strong encouragement to engage with the entire meeting / strict rule to not present at two of them would still need to be enforced to address this.
2) The friend / cronyism / popularity contest issue is still a big issue.. Attempts to ensure geographic, gender, and career-seniority diversity have worked somewhat, but still it seems like the same folks get asked a lot and others doing good work are ignored. Given the self-promotion angle that many people take to these meetings, we suggested a few years ago that workshop organizers ask the senior person (faculty, industry researcher) to nominate students or postdocs to present in their stead or jointly with them to help these folks get more attention and credit for the work they're doing. I'm happy to see this suggestion has persisted somewhat in subsequent years and I've attended several joint faculty-student talks in the past couple years.
3) Along these lines, I would advocate that for many microconferences / workshops the topic call should be given before announcing / confirming any speakers (half the speakers?) and let those interested apply and be given equal time to invited talks, instead of the current standard of submitted short papers that get relatively short presentations relative to the big invited names.
4) The most batshit insane thing that's been taking over recently is people with papers in the main conference submitting essentially the exact same work to be presented at the workshop in order to get more attention, especially if the main conference presentation is just a poster or lightning talk. The most upsetting version of this was someone not even bothering to show up for their short workshop presentation and letting a video play even when they had presented at the main conference. I hear this is also very prominent at CVPR. Here again, not collocating with bigger conferences would help.
5) One big benefit of collocation is of course broader participation, especially by students.
I don't know if this was mentioned already, but PLSC and WeRobot have a format very similar to the "not so royal society". Participants submit working papers/abstracts. Each paper gets three readers. At the (un)conference the author(s) sit in a room with the readers who discuss the paper. Others can also weigh in. The authors generally don't speak unless to clarify or answer questions. This proves to be immensely useful for refining work prior to an actual submission to law review. and it's a great way to learn about others' work