Electronic Conferences

by Steven M. Bachrach

Meetings and conferences play a critical role in the dissemination of information into the larger community, regardless of the discipline. They provide arenas for the immediate presentation of new results and cutting edge research with the opportunity of questions and answers to flesh out the materials. Personal contacts are made and enhanced, leading to collaborations and research opportunities. At broad meetings, such as those of the American Chemical Society or the American Physical Society), participants can quickly pick up on new activities in a large range of subdisciplines.

There are some disadvantages to meetings, however. Travel is expensive, and this dramatically reduces the potential audience; few students can attend meetings, even though they are perhaps the most important audience. Scientists located in poor countries or at financially-strapped institutions are rarely able to travel to meetings. Even those with sufficient funds find that the time constraints imposed by meetings often conflict with duties at their home institutions.

Over the past four years we have been experimenting with a new approach to conferencing, making use of the Internet to bring a community together without a physical presence. In this chapter, I will discuss how an electronic conference can be achieved, the advantages and disadvantages of this forum, and the future of e-conferencing. While this chapter will focus specifically on electronic conferences in chemistry, the material is applicable to any discipline.

Implementing an Electronic Conference

Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference

Technological developments on the Internet in the early 1990s created an environment that we felt could be suitable for holding an electronic conference. We first defined a set of essential components of a conference, regardless of whether the meeting is physical or virtual. These components are:

• ability to thoroughly present the scientific materials, mimicking a poster session at a traditional conference
• an easy procedure for obtaining the presentations
• rapid transfer of the presentations to each participant
• material available to a very wide audience
• ability of participants and authors to discuss each presentation. Discussions must have a simple interface and they must be recorded for later perusal.

In 1994, the electronic means for meeting these requirements were all in place. The World-Wide Web provided a robust environment for presenting scientific information. The Web permits a document to contain text, figures, and links to other materials. Powerful browsers (though primitive by today's standards) were finally available to enable the useful implementation of the concept of the web. Though editing tools for creating HTML (hypertext markup language) were sparse and primitive, we felt that hand-coding HTML documents would not be a great burden. Therefore, the Web itself provided the mechanism to create and deliver the presentations (components 1 and 2).

By this time the Internet had become quite pervasive, with convenient access at most major universities in the US and Europe and many companies online. The Internet had already reached into most countries by this time. However, many corporations still had not committed to full connectivity, having just email access. The major commercial Internet service providers (AOL, Compuserve, etc.) did not yet provide web access. Although there were some limitations, a wide audience could be reached (component 4). Transfer speeds were only marginal for many users, however, but the big wave of commercial usage of the Internet had not yet appeared so that access times were reasonable (component 3).

The most common use of the Internet in 1994 was electronic mail. We decided to use this mechanism for handling the discussions simply by creating an email discussion list specifically for the conference. Participants then would subscribe to the mailing list to receive all of the discussions via email. Therefore, participants could communicate with the entire membership through a familiar interface, the email system they were already using (component 5). We also captured each email message and converted it into a web page for archival use.

In November 1994 we held the First Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference (ECCC-1). This conference attracted over 70 presentations spanning the discipline of computational chemistry. Over 300 people registered for the conference by subscribing to the mailing list. No registration fee was charged.

The response to this e-conference was overwhelmingly positive. A survey of the participants was returned by more than 80 participants, and only one indicated that he would not participate in another e-conference. The positive responses centered on the areas of access and ease of participation. Many people commented on how easy it was to plug into the conference at their convenience. Since the conference ran for four weeks, there was no demand to be at a location at a specific time to hear a lecture. Rather, the participants could enter and leave as they pleased. Professors could still present their lectures and participate at the conference. Many of the participants were graduate students and post-docs who could easily join in since there was no fee. A number of participants noted that the lack of registration fees and travel expenses allowed them to participate, though they could not attend a physical conference at all that year because of financial constraints. One participant noted that she could participate fully in this e-conference, whereas since she is confined to a wheelchair, physical conferences impose many barriers; for example, posters at poster sessions are usually at an inconvenient height above her chair.

There were a few complaints about ECCC-1. The major complaint was a lack of personal interactions. There was no mechanism to meet at a lounge for informal discussions over a beer. Though one paper did discuss real-time interactivity across the net and did provide a mechanism for this activity, many participants missed the interactive nature of a physical meeting. (It should be pointed out that others actually found this non-interactivity a plus. The lack of interactivity allowed participants to read the presentation leisurely, think about it for a day or two and then pose a provocative question. The authors, under no time constraint that usually restricts discussions at a conference, took a day or two to reply, allowing time to really think about the questions and create a well-crafted response.) Second, there were complaints about the flood of email messages that were sent during the month of the conference. Every message sent went to every participant. While we encouraged participants to include the paper number in the subject header so that participants could screen the messages, many felt that this was not helpful; they still received messages concerning papers that did not interest them.

For ECCC-2, held in November 1995, we developed a discussion tool that was entirely web-based, eliminating the mailing list as a means of distributing discussions. A discussion forum was created for each paper in the conference. Participants could compose a message using a web form. The message then became another document in the conference and participants could easily navigate from a paper to the discussions and back again. This interface allowed each participant to view only the messages pertaining to papers of interest. No email traffic was generated at all. While most participants in ECCC-2 approved of the new communication mechanism, some felt that ECCC-2 was now "silent" and participants had to make a greater effort to find the active discussion areas. ECCC-2 attracted about 65 papers and 400 participants.

For ECCC-3, held in November 1996, we implemented a new interface for discussions. Still using a form-based mechanism for submitting comments, the new interface allowed each participant to customize the screen layout. Features included multiple frames and windows, the ability to subscribe to select papers, and the ability to include a photograph of oneself that attached to each message. These features could be added thanks to improvements in computer performance and additions to the standard web browsers. Over 500 people participated in ECCC-3 and nearly 70 papers were contributed.

ECCC-4 was held in November 1997, again attracting nearly 70 articles and nearly 800 participants. The new technological developments introduced in this conference were focussed on the mechanism of the article presentation. We developed a customized web server that converted the author's submitted HTML articles into a uniform presentation style. This interface was a protype for the Internet Journal of Chemistry, a new completely electronic chemistry journal we launched in January 1998.

The makeup of the four conferences changed little over the course of four years. The conferences are dominated by graduate students and post-docs, though the number of senior people has been increasing. Most participants have been from the United States, while Europe and South America have been well represented. There have been participants from six continents and from many third-world nations. The low cost of participation (no registration fee has ever been charged) has played a role in this broad range of participation.

Other E-Conferences in Chemistry

There have been a handful of other e-conferences in chemistry. The Electronic Conference on Trends in Organic Chemistry (ECTOC) has been held for four years. ECTOC has used the mailing list procedure for communicating discussions among the participants. ECTOC also has featured molecular hyperglossaries (containing three-dimensional structural information) for navigation among the papers. ECTOC-1 and ECTOC-2 attracted nearly 100 papers each and well over 300 participants.

The First Molecular Graphics and Molecular Modeling Society Electronic Conference (MGMS EC1) was held in Fall 1996. This conference made extensive use of interactive tools to facilitate communications between participants. A MOO (multiple user dimension, object oriented) allows for synchronous communication among users and the ability for the users to manipulate objects. The MOO environment creates a vritual world, complete with rooms that can contain objects that can be used, for example a video player. MGMS EC1 had a MOO with conference rooms and even a lounge. It also broke new ground by being the first e-conference in chemistry which charged a registration fee.

In fact, this was the first conference organized by Virtual Environments, Inc., a company providing the technology for electronic conferences. They since have held four additional e-conferences, have hosted (December 3, 1997) the first world-wide virtual seminar and panel discussion in chemistry, and hosted five additional seminars during 1998. These seminars offer real-time distribution of the discussion of the speaker and a small panel. Questions from the audience are handled via a moderator. This technology is quite fascinating as discussion threads interweave and panel members contribute responses to previous statements and questions. At first, reading this commentary in a disjointed assembly is disconcerting, but after a while, one is actually capable of reading three or four discussion themes at once. Nevertheless, failures in the performance of the server, the Internet and current browsers result in frequent breakdowns during the seminars. The approach has much merit, however, and future technological improvements surely will make this type of venue more popular and useful.

Evaluation of E-Conferences

Electronic conferences can offer many of the same features of traditional conferences. The main purpose of a scientific conference is the exchange of new results. Electronic conferences offer an excellent medium for this exchange. The web and HTML provide a robust environment for presenting information, allowing for extensive use of text, graphics, and multimedia. Since multimedia can be readily incorporated into any web presentation, a video-recorded lecture can become a document available through the web, and this would be virtually the same experience as attending a lecture. The web offers perhaps an even richer presentation experience by also allowing authors to incorporate interactive tools that each attendee can test.

The major advantages of electronic conferences are their low cost and the lack of travel time. A physical conference is located at a single venue at a set period of time. Electronic conferences lift this restriction. While the webserver is located at a physical site (which might be mirrored at a few other locations), the participants can access the conference from anywhere and at any time. E-conferences typically have run for a month, providing ample time for attendees to view materials at their leisure. Participants can both keep their commitments at their institutions and participate fully in the e-conference. We have seen that the low cost and minimum time commitment have allowed a large community to participate in the conferences, particularly students who usually must forgo expensive meetings.

There are perhaps only two major disadvantages to electronic conferences. The first is that a very important component of "physical" conferences is the opportunity to meet with other attendees, shake hands, share a meal, and create more personal relationships. This face-to-face gathering plays a real role in how science transpires and its role should not be minimized. While a "real" relationship can be achieved solely via electronic means (email, videoconferencing, electronic exchange of documents, etc.), a personal, human component is missing, and most people find this "contact" a valuable and meaningful, perhaps necessary, component of a succesful relationship. As real-time videoconferencing becomes easier to perform over the Internet, some more immediate, interactive interchange will become a larger component of e-conferences, but it will never replace the informal gathering around a dinner table.

The second disadvantage of electronic conferences is more of a cultural problem; this is the slow growth of general acceptance of this forum among the larger chemistry community as a means of communicating. Once again, we are facing the issue of chemists adapting to and accepting the new technology (and opportunities) afforded by the Internet. In chemistry, there is a cultural or societal reluctance to embrace the electronic media, but some communities have taken in e-conferencing as part of their experience. The ECCC conferences have been very popular. The first two ECTOC (synthetic organic chemistry and heterocyclic chemistry) conferences had large participation. However, ECTOC-3, which featured organometallic chemistry, attracted less than half the submissions of ECTOC-2. The number of e-conferences held in 1997 numbered less than 10, and even fewer were planned for 1998, a far cry from the number of "physical" conferences planned for that year. Until the Internet becomes an accepted medium for publication of chemistry, e-conference likely will struggle to gain a presence among the chemical community.

The Future of Electronic Conferences

Conferences and meetings have been critical means for scientists to exchange information for centuries, and this is unlikely to change. The increasing specialization within the sciences results in more and more specialty meetings every year. Yet, the growing restraints on budgets and time make individuals grow more and more selective about which conferences they can afford to attend.

Electronic conferences offer a real solution to this problem. The financial costs are markedly reduced. While we predict that more of these conferences will charge fees, costs of attending an e-conference will be less than a physical conference. Furthermore, e-conferences allow the participants to schedule their own attendance and participate at times convenient to them.

E-conferences are likely to fill three roles within the community. First, there will continue to be ‘stand-alone’ conferences, likely ECCC and ECTOC, that serve specialized communities. These are fairly easy to organize and run, require little management and are not computationally demanding. Second, e-conferences will be used as adjuncts to "physical" conferences. We have organized electronic poster sessions in conjunction with two symposia at national American Chemical Society meetings. These poster sessions have allowed people who could not physically attend the meeting to participate to some extent, either by contributing a poster or by visiting the e-sessions. We believe that this model is ready for much exploitation, since most of the difficult work in organizing a session is already done for the physical meeting; the addition of the e-session is quite minor. Third, e-conferences provide a real opportunity to continue a physical conference past its run dates. As is especially true at specialized meetings, like a Gordon Conference, discussion over some topics becomes quite heated and intense. Too often there is no forum for continuing these discussions after the meeting; the discussion just dies out. An e-conference forum that starts at the end of a meeting and continues on for some months afterwards (or perhaps until the next physical conference) will allow attendees to continue to debate the points and distribute new data as it becomes available. All the tools are now present to permit this extended conference model, and we hope that it will be tested in the near future.

The future of e-conferencing still depends on additional technological developments. One can envisage a time in the near future when real-time interactive voice and video can be transmitted effectively over the Internet. A conference then could have a series of open windows on the screen, each window carrying the video and audio of a participant at their home or office. The conferencing software would allow each of these audio/visual streams to be transmitted simultaneously to all participants around the globe. Question and answer sessions could be handled in real-time, supplemented with all of the multimedia and interactive tools of the net. Under this scheme, the only missing component of a physical meeting is the ability to shake your colleague's hand!

A minor problem of all real-time global interactive sessions will remain, regardless of the technological breakthroughs of the centuries to come. The earth is round and that means that half the world is experiencing night while the other half has day. In other words, at any given time, some participants must be awake in the middle of the night. If the session is important enough, people will suffer the inconvenience. True global interactive sessions, however, are likely to be infrequent.

While we are convinced of the utility of e-conferences and are optimistic that they will grow into a recognized and mainstream forum, we do not hear the death knell of the physical meeting. These gatherings serve a very real need for people to gather in person, something that will never be fully realized by the electronic medium. However, their frequency will likely decrease and they will be replaced by electronic conferences; virtual meetings simply offer markedly lower costs and easier scheduling.