How the coronavirus may reshape AI research conferences

COVID-19 officially became a global pandemic on Wednesday. As public health officials and governments respond; businesses brace for losses; and events like trade shows, SXSW, and Google's I/O shutter around the world, the disease is also impacting scientific conferences. Ironically, a coronavirus conference got canceled this week, and on Tuesday the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), one of the fastest-growing machine learning conferences in the world, shared that it will now be a virtual event held entirely online. Papers will be presented in prerecorded five-minute videos with a slide deck, while researchers invited to make longer presentations can submit 15-minute videos. In a post about the change to an all-digital conference, organizers called the cancellation of an in-person event an "… opportunity to innovate on how to host an effective remote conference."