Travel cancelations and lockdowns compelled organisers to hold their conferences and seminars online. A platform proposes to find them.
The last year has seen enormous growth in online seminars, as research communities worked around the inability to gather in person. Since its beginnings in April 2020, researchseminars.org has aimed to index seminars and conferences and to help researchers find talks of interest across the globe.
As we return to our classrooms and offices, we hope to sustain some of the benefits of online gatherings, even as we once again line up in front of blackboards and projectors.
Mathematics and other disciplines
Currently, researchseminars.org indexes more than a thousand upcoming talks, mostly in mathematics, though the site supports other disciplines as well. To make the site scalable, we allow users to add and maintain their own seminars once they have been endorsed by another user.
Moreover, we provide features that not only make it easier to reach a widespread audience, but also help with the mundane aspects of seminar organization. For example, the site provides links that organizers can send speakers to let them update their own title and abstract, it provides code that organizers can embed in their external website to produce an updating schedule, and it offers access-control mechanisms and instant registration for potential audience members.
Updating of Calendars
For attendees, we provide a web interface for filtering talks by topic, language, and other attributes. Users can download talk listings to external calendar programs in a way that updates as new talks are added. As more talks pass by, the ability to search past talks for links to slides and video recordings will grow more and more useful.
With users all over the world (over two million page views from 191 countries), translating time zones into local time makes it much easier to schedule talks of interest.
Non-virtual talks
Going forward, we hope the site will continue to be of use as in-person meetings begin to resume.
Besides indexing online and hybrid talks, we plan to allow users to search for in-person talks by geographic location. We hope that you will find researchseminars.org of use in advancing your own research.
Edgar Costa, Bjorn Poonen, David Roe, and Andrew Sutherland, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
This post was first published by IMU News.