Attending the Conference

Over the years, VNC has visited many interesting places like Tokyo or Amsterdam. This year, for reaons you all know, we will be at a very special place called "The Internet" which poses special challenges to organizers, presenters, and participants. Here, we want to provide you all relevant information to make your VNC experience as smooth and rewarding as possible.

Conference Format

Presentation of talks will be split into two parts: the talk itself and online discussion sessions.
The talk will be pre-recorded and accessible via edas two days before the conference starts. This allows you to watch the talk beforehand at a convenient time, and avoids having to spend 6 or 7 hours in a row in front of your screen. Papers will also be available online on time for participants to study.

Because VNC crucially depends on interactivity, we will condense all interactive elements into three-hour sessions that will happen on Wednesday to Friday (16.-18.12.2020) from 15:00 - 18:00 UTC. This corresponds to the following timezones:

  • San Francisco: 07:00 - 10:00
  • Boston: 10:00 - 13:00
  • Germany: 16:00 - 19:00
  • Japan: 00:00(+1) - 03:00(+1)
  • Sydney: 02:00(+1) - 05:00(+1)

This trade-off enables that most attendees don't have to stay up until early morning.
During these timeslots, we will hold discussion and poster sessions, keynotes, and a panel. Every paper session will be started with one-minute summary videos to recall the content of the presentation. However, participants should have watched the full videos before the session. The session time itself will then be used for discussion between moderator, presenters, and the audience. If you then want to go into in-depth discussions with the authors, there will be a dedicated Slack channel for each paper where authors should hang out after their session. Wednesday, we plan a virtual get-together after the last session where we want to interact with you in a number of videoconferencing channels for informal exchange.

Technical Platform and Technical Setup to Prepare for Online Participation

edas will be our central platform to access videos and to find links to the other platforms. Therefore, please make sure you setup an edas account if you do not already have one.

Interactive sessions will be conducted through zoom so you should check if your browser supports zoom or install the zoom app. In case you want to participate with own audio and video, you should also check your microphone and camera setup in combination with zoom. If you don't have suitable equipment or simply do not want to use audio and video, you will still be able to participate in discussions through the zoom chat.

Likewise, a client for the Slack chat will be useful so that you can conveniently follow all discussions. Again, a browser-based alternative client is available. In Slack, there will be a chat channel for technical and other support in case you have technical difficulties.

Furthermore, we will use gather.town platform for the social interaction, e.g., the virtual hangout, and the session of posters & demos. Please, note that gather.town will only open 2 hours before conference start. Further information is included in your attendee booklet.

Platinum Patron

  • Toyota

Gold Patron

  • Qualcomm

Sponsors

  • IEEE ComSoc
  • IEEE ITSS