Physicists gathered virtually for APS March Meeting

After the sudden cancellation of the American Physical Society’s March Meeting last year, this year’s event went virtual. Despite a lack of funding and other significant problems caused by the pandemic, international attendance was up 5% from 2019, and the 2021 event turned out to be one of the most popular yet. “We had 13 090 register and 12 412 unique visitors who logged in and attended the meeting,” says Hunter Clemens, APS’s director of meetings. “We were pleasantly surprised. . . . We thought attendance would be down from a face-to-face meeting.”

Indeed, many international attendees mentioned to Physics Today that one strength of the virtual meeting was that they didn’t have to apply for a visa or incur travel costs. Others said that because they work in industries or fields tangential to physics, they would not be able to use travel funds to attend, but they could justify the online registration fee, which at full price was about $200 less than the in-person meeting fee last year.

Claudia Fracchiolla, APS’s head of public engagement, points out that in many ways going virtual made the meeting more inclusive. However, some attendees were surprised by how much it cost to register. “I thought the attendance fees were high considering APS did not have to pay to use a conference center with lots of rooms,” says Cherrill Spencer, a retired SLAC physicist.

Thomas Gredig, a physics professor at California State University, Long Beach, says the March APS meeting atmosphere was considerably different. “Traditionally it has been a gathering to see colleagues, friends, mentors, and peers, in addition to learning about new trends and ideas,” he says. “The informal meetings were much fewer this year; the after-session Zoom rooms intended for addressing additional questions seem to have been attended irregularly by the presenters. Maybe a routine has not been established yet.”

“Adding networking was a thoughtful touch,” says Mikhail Tikhonov, an assistant professor of physics at Washington University in St Louis. “My student told me he had some very positive experiences. That said, I do hope the meeting goes back to in-person next time.”

The biggest challenge, according to attendees interviewed by Physics Today, was the jumping among websites to schedule, watch, ask questions, and converse with other attendees. “I found the interface awkward and not very user-friendly,” says Manuel S. Morales, a retired adjunct professor from Rowan University in New Jersey. Presenters faced additional technical challenges in trying to get their laptops and cameras to function well. “I would be more vested in learning how to get [the hosting platform] to work more smoothly if I didn’t think the March Meeting would be back in-person next year,” a presenter told Physics Today.

“One chair admitted that he’d watched the training video twice and he still didn’t understand that the attendees were not in the ‘room’ with the presenters and could not speak,” says Spencer. Adapting to the new meeting interface led to complaints that there was no easy way to quickly see a list of all the active sessions, or—because of the way people had filled out their meeting profiles—who exactly the attendees were or what fields they were interested in. Technical challenges, particularly with the poster sessions, led to some additional frustration.

Clemens acknowledges that some aspects were a struggle. “It is actually more difficult to run this virtual meeting than the in-person event because you have much less control over the conference environment,” he says. “For example, you are at the mercy of whatever bandwidth or internet issues each presenter may have. It also requires much more communication with the presenters and attendees. For a meeting this size, there were at least 70 technical people from the platform vendor working on it as well.”

Attendees were, on the whole, understanding of APS’s challenges. “I recently co-organized a virtual conference with 60 speakers, and I have to say I have enormous sympathy for the APS organizers, who had thousands,” says Tikhonov. “It wasn’t always smooth, but it was, after all, the first-ever virtual March Meeting.”

Attendees said one advantage of a virtual meeting was that they could easily read the slides, instead of squinting from the back of the room at a crowded in-person talk. Jenice Con Foo of Mad City Labs in Madison, Wisconsin, exhibited at the meeting. “I would be in favor of keeping some parts of the virtual experience even when we move back to in-person meetings,” she says. “But as an exhibitor, I still prefer in-person, as nothing can replace the casual conversation held in the booth or in the hallways.”

Those spontaneous confabs are hard to re-create in a virtual environment, attendees and APS staff agree. “I have friends who primarily come to APS to talk to their colleagues rather than attend any sessions,” says James Kakalios of the University of Minnesota.

Going online brought some advantages. “It was really easy to switch between two parallel sessions, and stopping the video or skipping a section made the consumption of information fun and really worthwhile,” says Gredig. “Some of the communication [channels] can probably be more streamlined, and as participants get more familiar, APS will improve and make virtual meetings very effective and efficient, less costly, and more environmentally sustainable .”

Joe Sabol, a consultant in Racine, Wisconsin, agrees. “This opens up the possibility of a speaker attending virtually, which will be a great benefit to combating climate change,” he says. Sabol also thinks the March Meeting was probably the first virtual conference for many of the attendees, and that once more people become familiar with the technology, in-person conversations might be replicated online.

According to APS, some speakers declined to allow their session to be recorded, but the rest of the sessions will be available until mid-June for attendees to watch. Michael Lawler, an associate professor of physics at Binghamton University in New York, wishes they would be available for a longer period. “Deleting the talk videos seems a little like the burning of the Library of Alexandria,” he says. “It has happened already in the last 10 years that a single talk video can start a whole field of research. Although that is not likely to happen, nevertheless there is a lot of value in these talks.”

The lessons of the March Meeting are being studied carefully says Clemens. In hindsight, more time should have been made available between sessions to allow the next set of presenters to get online and be ready. But the main goal was achieved, he says. “We allowed our members to present their work and stay engaged with the organization, and we continued our mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics.”