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**The Largest Scientific Hybrid Conference To Date**

*Thousands projected to participate in EMNLP 2021*

NEW YORK- October 27, 2021  - Some three thousand scientists and researchers are expected to participate in the upcoming [EMNLP 2021](https://2021.emnlp.org) (2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing). Based on current estimates, 600+ people will be in beautiful Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with thousands more attending and presenting online. 
Unique in the design is that every attendee, whether local or virtual, will have a rich engaging immersive experience. Presenters and attendees can either be local or remote, with full and equal participation for all.

It is easier said than done with an  [exciting program spanning 5 days](https://2021.emnlp.org/program) (November 7-11 2021), with 21 workshops, 2 satellite conferences, many parallel sessions, keynotes, plenaries, posters and more. 

Powered by [Underline ](https://underline.io)(underline.io), EMNLP 2021 is easily one of the larger scientific conferences, unique in that it is promoting a full democratic and equal experience for every attendee, with the notable exception that the online participants will not physically enjoy the beautiful Barceló Bávaro Convention Centre and surroundings in Punta Cana.

EMNLP 2021 Chairperson Marie-Francine Moens explained that “EMNLP has a long rich history of successful conferences that our community is looking forward to every year.  We were hoping that by November 2021 much of the world would already be past the pandemic. As the situation is fluid and changing daily, we needed to find a way to hold the event so every participant and presenter would have a deeply engaging and satisfying experience, regardless of their ability to attend in person.”

Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL Chief Executive said “running a conference of this size is always challenging. This becomes infinitely more difficult during the pandemic; especially when our goal is to provide an equal, engaging, interactive experience that is seamless, whether you are in or virtual. Besides the technical challenges, people’s availability change daily due to personal, health and country mandates.  
We are happy to partner with Underline to produce this conference since their platform and services will host much of the technical and organizational challenges both virtually and in-person.”

Alex Lazinica, CEO of Underline added “We are honored to work with ACL on EMNLP and their flagship conferences. Having produced Hybrid events of various kinds for many months, our team provides white-glove service and an unbeatable online platform to leading associations such as ACL, IEEE and many others.” 
                                                     
**About ACL and EMNLP ** 

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) provides the preeminent forum for dissemination of the latest developments in computational linguistics and natural language processing. In recent years, ACL conferences have enjoyed a growth spurt.  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) is a leading conference in the area of natural language processing and artificial intelligence.  EMNLP is organized by the ACL special interest group on linguistic data (SIGDAT) and was started in 1996. According to Microsoft Academic, EMNLP is the 14th most cited conference in computer science.

**About Underline Science **

Underline is the premier virtual conference platform for events in science, medicine, academia and other professional  fields. Underline’s mission is to capture and disseminate scientific knowledge through video, making it globally accessible by enriching and preserving both virtual and hybrid conference content. Underline’s groundbreaking  scientific Digital Video Library is providing new opportunities to access and expand the scientific record and  accelerate scientific discovery. For more information, visit the Underline website and follow Underline on Twitter. 

Thousands projected to participate in EMNLP 2021



EMNLP -Largest Hybrid Scientific Conference to Date

A **DOI**, or **Digital Object Identifier**, is a unique string of numbers, letters and symbols used to permanently identify a book, article, scientific paper, poster or **video**, and link to it on the web. The DOI is essentially a digital footprint or a Social Security number for the article or video content. Each piece of content is given a DOI at creation, and it can be used to identify the content during its lifespan – regardless of where it goes. 

Unlike a conventional Web address, or URL, a DOI does not specify the location of an online object, but rather its content. A DOI is a "persistent" identifier, and while web addresses change, the DOI remains a constant.

Developed by a group of international publishers, the first DOIs were created in 2001. As of 2020, approximately **230 million DOI names** have been created, and there are more than **five billion DOI lookups** every year. The DOI system is used by more than 5K publishers and science data centers.

Scholars and researchers have long cited the journals and papers they have utilized when drafting a piece of work or study, both to give proper credit, but also as a way of supporting the credibility of the study itself. While this kind of “citeability” is important in all academic disciplines, it is acutely critical for scientific advancement and discovery, why Underline’s authority to issue DOIs for your important video content is such a valuable tool.

DOIs make it easier to retrieve works, and they augment a video or article’s likelihood for citation, which is why citation styles like **APA (American Psychological Association)** and **MLA (Modern Language Association)** recommend including them. DOIs also form a key component of certain reference-linking systems and are indexed in Major Library Discovery and A&I Services such as **ALMA/Primo, Google Scholar, Encore, WorldCat and CrossRef.**

The scholarly research eco-system includes preprints, conference proceedings, publications, journals, and books that have a DOI. Conference Video Lectures and Poster Sessions are also part of the research eco-system that should have a DOI, and now **Underline Science, Inc. has ensured that the videos in the Digital Video Library will be given this important research tool and be fully discoverable.**

All of this is to say – why have your valuable scientific research and content go undiscovered? The content from Underline’s conference presenters and speakers is highly valuable and needs to be part of the global scientific record. 

This is why Underline has undertaken the important step to make sure that your video and poster work IS discoverable, citable, and will have lasting value to other researchers and scholars around the world.

Underline Science ([underline.io](https://)) has been approved for all of its conference video content and poster sessions to have a DOI!!

Underline Will Enrich Your Video Content with DOI Numbers - so why is this important?

After a year that collectively left us exhausted and perhaps occasionally questioning our sanity, we are all looking forward to a return to normal this year. Still, there are countless questions about what the future holds.

Depending upon where one is located in the world, we have a long way to go with feeling safe and managing the daily mess of Covid 19. Travel is still complicated, with a dynamic patchwork of protocols and entry and exit rules for different countries, and even regions or states within countries. Couple this with varying levels of vaccine distribution, and one thing is very clear: it will be touch and go for the next 12–18 months with individuals, organizations and municipalities assessing their comfort levels for any given situation or event.

2020 became the year of the virtual event, as associations conference organizers pivoted en masse to the digital format. While this was a great solution for many groups, there were elements of in-person events that missed. As our understanding of Covid-19 evolved, opportunities presented themselves for “hybrid” events, and as we march into 2021, it seems clear that this will be the year of the hybrid event.

**WHAT IS A HYBRID EVENT?**

Hybrid events take the best and most manageable elements of physical gatherings and blend them with a virtual event. You can host attendees at your venue — with event planners following guidelines for social distancing and ongoing sanitization of areas throughout the event — while offering live streams to some or all the content for those who can’t make it, or those who are not quite yet comfortable attending in person.
The hybrid event offers a winning situation for both organizers and attendees while the world recovers from the challenges of the pandemic. But hybrid events offer much more than this. Now that many conference organizers have seen the benefits of a virtual offering, several polls show a solid majority of event planners have indicated they will continue to accommodate a virtual audience as a permanent part of their planning going forward. While events have been slowly but steadily moving in this direction for the last few years, 2020 turbocharged this evolution, and there is likely no going back.

**BENEFITS OF CHOOSING HYBRID EVENTS**

**More Attendees**

More ways to attend will boost numbers. Not all of your potential registrants will be able to attend your events due to scheduling conflicts, healthy concerns, and/or budgetary restrictions. By making your event available online, you’ll remove these barriers and reach more people with your content. The first week of February it was announced that the Sundance Film Festival — utilizing a hybrid format — secured a total audience 2.7 times their typical in-person edition, and its biggest-ever audience in the history of the storied festival. While a small number of guests were on hand for limited in-person events, Sundance mostly streamed its 2021 content to online viewers in all 50 states and additionally in 120 countries. In total, the festival recorded more than 250K views of feature and short films through its online platform and apps.

**Go Green**

Scaled down physical attendance can also translate to a more environmentally conscious event, with lower carbon emissions and waste. This is a key point you can promote to your target audience, attendees and sponsors, which may help drive interest and engagement.

**Less Risk for Organizers**

Because we have seen constantly shifting protocols, it makes both organizers and sponsors nervous to deploy resources to an event being planned months in advance, when the rules of the day are so dynamic. Hybrid events can be scaled up or down to adjust the in-room/virtual balance based upon the municipal or regional restrictions in place at the time of the event.

**Additional Revenue Streams**

Keynote and session recordings can be repurposed as promotional pieces for other events, which has the potential to significantly lower future marketing costs. In addition, with Underline’s Digital Video Library, you can establish a new source of ongoing non-membership revenue. All these videos now reside in our repository and continue to promote the discourse and scholarship presented at your conference. More than 90% of Libraries surveyed have expressed the willingness to allocate funds and purchase access to an authoritative repository of scientific conference information. Underline shares 20% of this revenue with you on a pro-rate usage basis.

**Data**

Finally, Underline can track extremely detailed event engagement through virtual conferences, and this information can then be used to improve event details in the future.

**HYBRID EVENT CONSIDERATIONS**

It feels like several years have passed since the pandemic started. In that time, the events realm has already gone from a complete halt, to a pivot to virtual, and now to a mashup of virtual and hybrid. At Underline, we have done several of these hybrid events, including IEEE’s Big Data Conference in December, which predominately a digital event, also had an intriguing hybrid component, via partnership with IBM and their IBM Watson supercomputer.

Combined with our deep experience hosting digital events, we have learned some considerations when planning a hybrid event.

You’ll need to determine:

Do you have the resources and budget for both virtual and hybrid events?

Which components of your event should be virtual versus in-person?

Hybrid events aren’t as simple as just live-streaming pre-existing sessions. They require careful planning, engagement, and logistical management that differs across both formats.

Hybrid events also require a happy balance to be struck between the virtual and in-person components. This can be done several ways, from flanking the main stage with large-scale screens to allow the digital participants to be engaged alongside the in-person guests, to creating tiered access to your attendees. With all of these considerations, having a partner on your side with the team and experience to help guide you is essential.

**PICK YOUR PARTNERS CAREFULLY**

You may have read articles about how hard it is to do a hybrid event. That it is twice the work, and that you will need two sets of staff– one that does traditional event planning, and one that can handle the digital portion of the event.

The truth is that what really matters is your choice of event partner. The virtual component of these events is complex, with myriad technical considerations and other factors that are likely new to an association or conference organizer.

So, why try to do both?

At Underline, we’re with you every step of the way. We sweat the details, so you can focus on your in-person stakeholders, attendees and VIPs.

**THE UNDERLINE DIFFERENCE**

With Underline, event organizers get an experienced team of 20+ people who live and breathe your event, from pre-planning through complete execution.

We communicate with all the speakers, panelists, presenters and poster sessions.

We collect all the pre-recorded addresses with our proven workflow and easy browser-based recording system.

We do ‘dry runs’ and coach the keynote and other star presenters.

Production values are paramount. Evidenced by our previous scientific conferences, we strive for the highest-quality production values.

We are proud to have a 4-time Emmy award-winner directing our efforts to ensure the highest quality for your conference.

We create a custom experience for your conference that becomes an extension of your website or conference app — and provides for an unparalleled experience.

Our client partners provide the direction and then just show up and enjoy.

Hybrid Events are not the future - they are NOW.

Hybrid Events Are Here To Stay, And That’s A Good Thing

When the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world in 2020, many associations chose to transform their in-person events into virtual conferences. The world of scientific and scholarly associations has been irrevocably affected by COVID-19, and there is growing evidence that virtual events — including hybrid meetings — will be here to stay, long after the pandemic. There are several reasons for this:

Overall attendance for many events has increased 100–200% vs. in person events from the previous year. Due to the cost of travel and the logistics of managing complicated personal schedules, more people are able to attend virtual meetings and engage with attendees and conference content.

As we reflect upon the experiences of 2020, most of us have now attended one or more virtual events. Some went smoothly and were a blast. Some maybe not so much. The truth is that putting together a virtual conference is a major undertaking, and it really is in the details as to why some events thrive in a virtual or hybrid environment, and others struggle.

At Underline, we’re with you every step of the way. We sweat the details, so you can focus on your stakeholders, attendees and VIPs — and on having a good time at your own conference!

Academic, scientific and medical conferences are rich with valuable discourse and experiences that enable critical networking and idea exchanges. Pivoting these conferences to a virtual experience presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for associations.
A conversion to a virtual format is not simply a choice to use whatever webinar software is within reach. Significant thought will need to go into a strategic plan on important decisions ranging from dates and registration fees, to how best to engage and showcase presenters, sponsors, and exhibitors.

Immediately, questions come up:

*How can we produce the same level of impact when we are all dispersed around the world and in front of our screens?*

*How do we organize a virtual conference?*

*What will it look like?*

*Maybe we can imagine a few keynotes & plenaries, but how do we handle 1,000+ presentations and associated papers?*

*What about the Panels? Poster Sessions? Workshops?*

*What will happen to our sponsors — how can we deliver value to them?*

*What happens if we experience technical difficulties — in the middle of the conference?*

And what about the attendees themselves?

When attending a conference, they are ‘captive audiences’ and will attend the various sessions on a program. 

*But what happens when they are at their desks and one quick click away from Facebook or their distraction of choice?*

And what about the networking opportunities — *how do we meet people if we are not gathering around a coffee stand or dining table?*

And finally, what happens after the conference? *What happens to all the scholarship and important discourse?*

These are all valid questions, and enough to make many association event managers or academic event chairs start to throw their hands up in the air and think that it is simply too much to manage.

The truth is, it can be…especially since this is likely new territory for most associations and academic societies.

**An Opportunity in Disguise**

After considering all the things required to successfully manage a virtual conference, many societies might consider moving to a virtual event as a problem — but it can also be an opportunity.
This could be an opportunity to dramatically ‘scale up’ instead of scale down the scope and impact of the conference.

You could:

• Expand the number of attendees

• Expand the possible revenue streams

• Offer a more engaging experience to your attendees

• Present an exciting program your delegates will anticipate attending

• Facilitate networking and conversations, multiplying the number and scope of interactions in ways not possible with a physical meeting

• Continue the conversations and conference impact after the conference

**Live-Streaming Takes Center Stage**

We always anticipated that live-streaming and even remote presentations would be part of many traditional in-person conferences and had previously developed those capabilities.

With the advent of the 2020 pandemic, those plans have now become the focus of many conferences, which, perhaps like you, are looking to move to a virtual presentation.

**An Exciting, Interactive TV-Quality Presentation**

You would never consider using unprofessional signage or communication at your events. Why settle for less at your most important conference?
Even if they don’t watch the Oscars or Emmy awards, your audience knows the difference between a professional TV production and anything less.

You want to make sure your production has those all-important production values that keeps your audience riveted to the screen and to your program.

**The Secret? Interaction**

Studies of conference attendees have shown that people attend conferences for two reasons: The Education and the Networking.

How do we preserve the networking? How do we have an interactive event rich with quality Q&A, immediate responses, discussions among attendees, discovery of new colleagues from around the world, discovery of new research and possible avenues for further collaboration?

We have heard from many attendees that networking via our virtual coffee break rooms and via other opportunities has been less intimidating than approaching someone in person. No more awkward 5-minute exits!

These are all hallmarks of the ingredients in the Underline platform and offering.

**Bottom Line: The Underline Difference**

Here are eight things which set Underline apart from all the other providers in the marketplace:

**1) Underline specializes in Scientific Conferences**

This is all we do. We are here to help produce your Scientific Conferences, and enhance and preserve the lectures in our Digital Video Library. This provides you with a way to preserve the important scholarship & discourse, continue the conversations, collaboration, and presenting new ongoing revenue streams.

**2) White Glove Service. Underline handles everything**

With Underline, event organizers get an experienced team of 20+ people who live and breathe your event, from pre-planning through complete execution.

We communicate with all the speakers, panelists, presenters and poster sessions.

We collect all the pre-recorded addresses with our proven workflow and easy browser-based recording system.

We do ‘dry runs’ and coach the keynote and other star presenters.

We create a custom experience for your conference that becomes an extension of your website or conference app — and provides for an unparalleled experience.

We sweat all the details. Our client partners provide the direction and then just show up and enjoy.

**3) TV Quality production**

Production values are paramount. Evidenced by our previous scientific conferences, we strive for the highest-quality production values.
We are proud to have a 4-time Emmy award-winner directing our efforts to ensure the highest quality for your conference.

**4) Maximizing Interactivity**

We are continuously improving this most-requested feature. How do we create interactivity within each presentation for Q&A? How do we have virtual coffee breaks or other discussion groups around certain subjects where people meet, discuss and forge new relationships? How can sponsors develop connections with people in their virtual exhibit space? How do poster presenters find new audiences for their presentations?

**5) Compressing Time — Optimizing for Virtual**

Taking a photo of a book does not magically turn it into an engaging digital publication. Similarly, a Virtual Conference is not a mirror of a physical conference conducted over Zoom or some other conferencing software.

We have strategies and tools to “compress time” and present your conference in an exciting, engaging TV-quality production (headed by our Emmy-award winning director); where your audience will look forward to watching and interacting with your entire program.

**6) Maximizing Attendance**

Here is another significant opportunity for a virtual conference that you cannot match in a physical venue. People would want to attend more conferences but are limited in schedule, cost/budgets and/or visa considerations.

With your virtual event it is much more affordable — without the travel, hotel costs and food.

This can potentially open up your attendance to a much larger pool of prospective delegates from around the world.

**7) Maximizing Sponsor Revenue**

No longer limited to sponsoring networking breaks or lunches, we have developed an entirely new smorgasbord of sponsorship options and revenue opportunities. We look to maximize the ‘digital real estate’ in a dignified and meaningful way to construct impactful packages which resonate with your sponsors.

**8) New Post Conference Revenue Streams**

Using our optional Digital Video Library, you can establish a new source of ongoing non-membership revenue. All these videos now reside in our repository and continue to promote the discourse and scholarship presented at your conference.

More than 90% of Libraries surveyed have expressed the willingness to allocate funds and purchase access to an authoritative repository of scientific conference information. We then share 20% of this revenue with you on a pro-rate usage basis.

**So, yes, an experienced virtual conference partner is critical, and can make the difference between an average or even disastrous conference, and one that will ensure your attendees come back next year!**

Underline's White Glove Service makes planning a virtual conference easy.

Why Underline’s White Glove Service Is So Important When Planning a Virtual/Hybrid Conference

Once you have decided to hold a virtual conference for the scientific community, you are beset with a million details to organize and an overwhelming number of questions.

How do we design our event? How much of the event will be live? How much will be virtual? How do we preserve the potential for interactivity? 

In a physical conference, your audience is usually pretty captive, e.g.,  at the venue or in the room. However, with a virtual conference your audience can easily "change the channel" and click over to something else in a heartbeat. How do you maintain their attention?

All great questions.

At Underline, we produce TV-quality events that strive to delight the attendees. We understand how important it is to engage conference attendees on a variety of levels so the audience remains glued to the screen.

I want to share with you what I believe is the secret to every successful virtual scientific conference...

**The One Thing Every Virtual Conference Must Have**

Here is the one thing most people forget when planning a virtual conference. Actually, it is just as important for an in-person physical conference, but for a virtual scientific conference it is beyond crucial, and that is the answer to this question:

What happens after the conference? Where do these videos live after your event is over?

There must be some sort of REPOSITORY – some place where attendees can come and revisit the videos. There must be a place for people to view these videos in a time-shifted manner, such as if they have a schedule conflict or are in a different time-zone. 

You also want to have something more relevant, useful and delightful than a bunch of files on a shared server. 

Just as the actual event must delight the attendee, so too the repository must provide significant added value to the viewer. This is just as important whether they are experiencing the conference a month or a year later. 

**Why is the Repository So Crucial?**

A well-executed repository is mandatory for a virtual event (and for an in-person event as well). It is imperative that we preserve the record of what transpired. 

For scientific conferences with presented research, you certainly want to ensure that the discourse and scholarship does not end after your three or four days. While there are printed proceedings, what happened at the conference usually disappears without a repository. 

Also, when designing a virtual event, you have many more choices as to how to design your conference.  

After all, just trying to mimic an in-person conference is like taking a picture of a magazine and calling it a digital publication. That’s not the experience you want.

**New Levers, New Controls, More Flexibility**

The decision matrix and flexibility with a virtual conference is much different than a physical one. Let us compare some differences for you to consider:

![](https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/31a14d2e0ceb13dfa243a80520cd65ef.jpg)

As you can see from the above, designing a well-executed virtual conference with professional TV production values is not simple but quite do-able.

In my view, the most important aspect is a well-done repository. After all, now that we can watch YouTube and Netflix on our phones, why not attend the conference from the same mobile device?

Some open questions include: 

How do we maintain the flexibility of on-demand with the interactivity of "live"?

How do we continue the conversation after the conference is over?

How do we make the videos as discoverable and valuable as primary research?

**Continuing the Conversation**

The other important point of a well-designed repository is the ability to continue the conversation after the event. 

Sure, you can have someone view the lecture. But can they continue the Q&A? If they discover this lecture a day/month/year later, can they still be part of the presentation?

In our view, this is absolutely essential. The ability to time-shift is one of the main levers we can use to enable technology to our advantage.

These are all important questions, and at Underline, we have spent the last two years refining the answers to these issues. 

Please feel free to reach out to discuss your next event – whether in person, virtual, or a hybrid. 

[Contact Us](mailto:conferences@underline.io)

A repository is the one thing most people forget when planning a virtual conference. Actually, it is just as important for an in-person physical conference, but for a virtual scientific conference it is beyond crucial.

Why Every Virtual Scientific Conference Needs a Repository 

Perhaps your crystal ball is better than mine, but to be honest, nobody knows what the pandemic situation will be in a few months. 

Sure, things will slowly return to semi-normal, but will people travel to conferences? Do the economics and logistics warrant holding an in-person event, or do we postpone? Or, do we move to some sort of online or virtual conference format? Or, is there some hybrid option for both in-person and remote? 

Yes, these are challenging questions, but I have some particularly good news for you.

There is a hidden opportunity here which can propel your event to new heights. 

**Let us ask some more empowering questions: **

Can we reframe this situation not as a problem, but as an opportunity? Something to jolt us out of our age-old habits of how we used to have a conference? 

Can we use this challenge to foster new, exciting ways to organize the presentation, learning and networking experience of a scientific conference? 

Can we perhaps expand to a more global audience, one that might not have attended in the past?

**Transcending Time & Space**

Most physical in-person conferences follow a similar formula: The (your event name here) conference will be held on (your dates, usually between one and four days) at (pick your favorite destination or the city you deemed most affordable). Of course, based on experience, you also can project the number of people who will attend. 

How can you double or triple the number of attendees? In our research, we found that generally people want to be at more than the three conferences they usually attended. 

With a physical event, not everyone can attend due to various constraints, perhaps budgetary, schedule, distance, visa or other such issues. A virtual event is free of such limitations therefore you can now open yourselves up to a much larger global audience. 

Let’s talk money. 

Expected revenues from attendees or sponsors usually ends with the completion of each conference. As do the networking opportunities between delegates. Can there be a way for this to continue on after the three days of the conference?

**Expand Your Reach**

Now, imagine for a moment a world free of these limitations. Imagine if that very same physical event were held in ten of the world's major cities simultaneously, instead in just one location. Maybe NY, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Singapore, Tokyo, Delhi, Mumbai, Shanghai - what would that do to your attendance?

With an online event, you can begin to approach your conference with similar expansion goals. You can expand it to a global audience of both speakers and attendees. Freed from the constraints of a physical location, they can either pre-record their presentations or present live. They can respond to questions and begin networking during the scheduled times, or even time-shift their involvement to a schedule which suits their time zone.

Similarly, you can expand your list of invited speakers, as you are no longer limited to those who are willing to travel to your event. Perhaps now you can recruit stellar speakers who can spare an hour or so to present to your audience. How would that change the makeup of your conference?

**Timing is Everything**

Now that you have accepted the notion of a global audience (instead of a local one), let’s turn to the concept of time. In the old physical conference, you worked on a schedule to cram as much material into the three or four days. Many times, this means five or ten parallel tracks, leaving attendees with the ongoing difficult choices of “Which session should I attend?”

Imagine if you can design an event where you are not limited to trying to get it all presented within a few days, but you can allow enough time for everyone to view, learn and interact with the speaker with plenty of time? 

What if this interaction was not limited to the few days of the conference but lasted for months? 

What if it accommodated people from all time zones, so someone in Asia can have the same experience as their colleague in Europe or the USA?

**Three Things to Know**

Having read this far, hopefully you are thinking of many more possibilities to expand your events to new heights. Whether your event ends up being physical, virtual or a hybrid, you now have many more options for redesigning the conference to dramatically expand your audience, reach and effectiveness. 

After all, the reason you hold a conference is to promulgate the knowledge, scholarship and interactive discourse to the widest possible audience, so let us maximize that mission.

Where do you get the tools and how do you make it happen? You can certainly try to develop your own solution. Or, you can partner with a company that specializes in scientific conferences.

So, let us design your next generation global conference. The first three things you will want to know are your responses to these questions:

How do we define success? 

Can we come up with metrics as to attendees, sponsors, presentations, financial and the like?

What is the Vision? 

What do we wish to achieve in terms of user experience, interactivity, and audience satisfaction? 

How do we deliver great value to sponsors and maximize that revenue?

What happens after the conference? 

How do we keep the party going year-round? 

Can we come up with a plan to continue the revenue possibilities as well?

**Summary**

When “life hands you lemons, you make lemonade” is more than just an expression. Our current situation presents an opportunity to achieve a higher level of excellence for our organization’s mission.

As a former robotics scientist, I experienced first-hand the challenges inherent in traditional scientific conferences.  

As a founder of IntechOpen, the world’s largest Open Access book publisher, I am passionate about the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the widest possible audience. 

That is why, two years ago, I embarked on a project to create the world’s first repository platform for cutting-edge scientific lectures, research, discussions and conference live-streaming. We are privileged that some of the world’s leading societies and conferences have partnered with us to help design and produce their event.  

Please feel free to reach out to discuss your next event – whether in person, virtual, or a hybrid. 

[Contact Us](mailto:conferences@underline.io)

Whether your event ends up being physical, virtual or a hybrid, you now have many more options for redesigning the conference to dramatically expand your audience, reach and effectiveness. How do you create a successful conference? 

Three Things to Know for a Successful Virtual Conference

Scientific Conferences are an essential part of the lifeblood of every professional.  We looked forward to these meetings from our earliest student days. We would attend to hear the latest research in our chosen field, be among the first to learn of important breakthroughs and of course, the opportunity to meet and greet the "movers and shakers" changing our world. Then came the worldwide pandemic which upended our lives. Now what?

Many people spent precious months preparing submissions of their latest papers and now lack a proper venue for publication and presentation. What can a society or conference organizer do? Even if the event is months away, can it still be held? How will it change?

The obvious answer is to move the conference online as a virtual or remote conference. But how do you do that?

**Not Your Run-Of-The-Mill Webinar**

The first knee-jerk reaction is to consider webinar or web conference software. Sounds good at first blush. Then we dig a little deeper and ask some people who have gone down this path.

Webinar software is quite effective for its intended design goals. Webinar software is a great way for people to "call-in" and see a group of slides.  Many packages do offer some degree of chat question & answer and polling capabilities. But does it begin to come close to a conference experience, or are we settling for less than we should?

**Some Important Questions**

Among the first questions you probably want to ask are:

How do you enable meaningful Q&A between the speakers and audience?

How do you enable person-to-person interaction and networking? 

How do you enable poster sessions? Breakout Rooms? 

Does everyone perform their presentation "live" or are some portions pre-recorded? Which then begs the question: How do you work with hundreds of submitted papers/presentations? How do we establish a workflow that makes this do-able, or are we asking for weeks of hard detailed labor and FTP or other file transfer of huge recordings?

How do you maximize Sponsor interaction so the sponsors receive value for their sponsorship? 

Do we keep the same schedule we had or how do things change once we move online? 

How do we best accommodate attendees in different time-zones who are now not physically attending (so they are still in their home time-zone)? Is everything "live" or some items available time-shifted so they can view at their convenience?

What new things can we do once we are doing an online conference versus a physical conference? What can we do better? How do we achieve better results?

And finally, what happens with these presentations after the conference?  Will it be like many physical conferences where all this important scholarship and discourse is not captured? 

Or is there a better approach?

**Quality Production**

Another important consideration is the quality of the experience and the end product. 

You would not hold your physical conference in a less-than-acceptable venue. Should you subject your audience to sit through hours of presentations if the audio/video/production quality is uneven?

We enjoy TED talks for their content but also their production values. We are all familiar with the level of a high-quality Television production. That should be the minimum benchmark for an on-line event; one which delights the attendees to stay, linger, interact and most importantly, come back next year. 

**The Authoritative Repository**

As a former Robotics Scientist and founder of the world’s largest Open Access publisher, the need for a comprehensive authoritative repository has been on my mind for a long time. 

Two years ago I launched the project for what is now called Underline Science, establishing the world’s first repository platform for cutting-edge scientific lectures, research, discussions and conference live-streaming.

We are very honored to have more than 30 leading conferences using our platform in the next few months with more than a hundred coming on board as we scale. 

We did not start two months ago in response to the coronavirus; we have been honing the experience for two years. 

Please feel free to reach out to discuss your next event – whether in person, virtual, or a hybrid. 

[Contact Us](mailto:conferences@underline.io)

Scientific Conferences are an essential part of the lifeblood of every professional.  Then came the worldwide pandemic which upended our lives. Now what?

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EMNLP -Largest Hybrid Scientific Conference to Date

Underline Conference Organizer Tips