I can't possibly give specific reasons for a complete set of events, but here are some personal thoughts.
The latest hybrid conference one of my students went had a 90% online attendance. The interaction with participants, speakers, and session chairs was almost zero. For my student, the usual excitement and opportunity to network was completely lacking, as even social breaks in the programme were suffering from a dearth of humans. I find that the biggest benefit of a conference is the interaction with like-minded researchers and I feel I didn't manage to have any meaningful interactions during the COVID-19 online events. Thus my guess is that one potential reason is that event organisers also value meaningful human interaction and after our recent experiences also feel that this is not achieved at all (so not even to a small degree) online with hybrid being oftentimes also simply "mostly online".
Having said that, the APS community of INFORMS has an online series of seminars that I value a lot, attend as much as my schedule allows, and appreciate for the interactions it provides me. However, this may be because the seminar participants are mostly a close-knit community already.
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Maria Vlasiou
Professor in Stochastic Processing Interacting Networks
Department of Mathematics
University of Twente, The Netherlands
vlasiou@gatech.eduhttps://www.win.tue.nl/~mvlasiou/------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 03-13-2023 09:39
From: Souradeep Koley
Subject: Why workshops and conferences are not virtual
I have a naive question, why most conferences and workshops are not happening in hybrid mode?
If anyone knows any specific reasons, feel free to reply.
Thanking you
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Souradeep Koley
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