Hi HN, I'm the developer (@srush_nlp). This was made for ICLR a deep learning conference we ran last month. We couldn't find any tools to do the things we wanted so we went a bit rogue and built it ourselves. There's a bunch of ML bits in it as well. Here's the back story <a href="https://twitter.com/srush_nlp/status/1253786329575538691?s=19" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/srush_nlp/status/1253786329575538691?s=1...</a> .<p>I'm a professor, not a software engineer, so happy for any comments or contributors!
I love this. Conferences and the publishing business are extremely scammy IMO. There's no reason you need to pay anyone $500 to host a pdf.<p>What researchers want is discoverability and credit. Some researchers are already famous and own their own distribution via arxiv or Twitter but for new researchers publishing a paper at a prestigious conference is a way to bootstrap a reputation.<p>If you really wanna get rid of large publishers what you really need to solve is discoverability and you can solve it with a combination of virtual mini conferences and callouts on Twitter and Hacker News.<p>I've gotten some of the best constructive feedback on my blog posts from Hacker News directly, I don't see how that's different from peer review. I don't find it very likely that someone would even be willing to give me feedback unless they themselves are already subject matter experts.<p>But really the impact of a piece of computer science research is directly correlated to how many people directly use the OSS inspired by the research. People in industry know this, what's left is is for tenure committees to also take software impact into account.
Sci-fi legend Kim Stanley Robinson was a keynote speaker at our virtual conference!! I guarantee that wouldn't of happened if we were in person.<p>Virtual conferences are terrific. I just helped host the AirMiners conference [1] on carbon removal on May 13. Because it was a virtual conf we were able to achieve top speakers, international attendees, and just seemed so much more effective.
(KSR's keynote is here: <a href="https://youtu.be/9Pw0n0CeK0k" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9Pw0n0CeK0k</a>)<p>It's going to be an uphill battle to get me to attend an in person conference again.<p>[1] <a href="http://airminers.org" rel="nofollow">http://airminers.org</a>
This looks great! I’d love to see some of the fantastic context in your lovely Twitter thread included on the website.<p>As someone who’s currently in industry rather than academia, I interpreted “virtual conference” as “a Twitch or YouTube stream, and likely some sort of chat space like a Discord”. That landing page does a great job of explaining the technical underpinnings of your tool, but doesn’t actually explain what sort of site/services the web server actually serves!<p>Even just including the GIF from the beginning of your Twitter thread would be super helpful.
The conference was amazing, and the portal was very usable! I really liked the page where you can find similar papers from a clustering map. Thank you and the team for the hard work, top stuff!