By Richard Moore
It has been nearly one month since the first virtual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA21), which was held jointly with the SIAM Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX21), the SIAM Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms (SOSA21), and the SIAM Symposium on Algorithmic Principles of Computer Systems (APOCS21). Therefore, it seems like a good time to take note of some important statistics.
523 people registered for SODA21. This is the highest attendance ever recorded for the SODA conference; in fact, this year’s total is 16 percent higher the previous record set at SODA17 in Barcelona, Spain. Also breaking a SODA record was the number of papers submitted: 641 this year. A breakdown of the SODA21 participants by country is not yet available, but I expect it will show a similarly global distribution to last year’s SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science (MDS20) and SIAM Annual Meeting (AN20), which saw representation from 57 and 28 countries, respectively. Peak attendance was on the first day with 359 active participants; attendees have continued to visit the conference platform daily to enjoy the pre-recorded and live-recorded sessions.
Engagement with the SODA21 program was very strong. For example, the number of views per session was as high as 316 for Tim Roughgarden’s (Columbia University) plenary talk, “Beyond Worst-Case Analysis,” which took place on Sunday, January 10. The other plenary talks by Maria Chudnovsky (Princeton University), Ryan Williams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Robert Krauthgamer (Weizmann Institute of Science) each amassed well over 100 views. Of the prerecorded content available on demand, Daniel Seemaier’s (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) presentation about “Multilevel Acyclic Hypergraph Partitioning” had the most views at 151, with 104 attendees viewing the associated live session ALENEX Session 1. Live sessions from SODA21 and SOSA21 also exceeded 100 views. The total number of views across all content on the SODA21 platform totaled more than 8,000. Conference features like the chat rooms and Gather.town space for coffee breaks saw moderate use, and we hope to boost engagement with these elements at future virtual conferences via more focused messaging to attendees. In fact, we have already identified the ten active attendees who topped the leaderboard and are mailing them SIAM masks.
Finally, I am pleased to report that generous sponsorship from Google and Microsoft allowed us to grant all 124 student requests for “travel” support (i.e., registration fee waivers). A total of 282 students registered for SODA21; while the remaining students declined to apply for travel awards, we aim to increase applications at future virtual conferences as we improve our messaging around the navigation of this new conference format.
For those of you who just couldn’t make it to every event during the live conference, all pre-recorded and live-recorded content from SODA21 is available on the conference platform until April 10, 2021! Simply log in with your credentials and enjoy.
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Richard Moore is the Director of Programs and Services at SIAM. |