HCOMP2020 is going virtual

The Dutch institute for media culture Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision will be your virtual HCOMP2020 co-host and will bring a little taste of the Netherlands directly to you. Enjoy the video greeting below!

Over the last months, we have been closely monitoring the ongoing situation around Covid-19. Given the measures that have been put into place around the world, and the uncertainty about how the situation will evolve between now and the end of October, the HCOMP organising committee and AAAI have decided that in 2020 HCOMP will be a virtual conference. Our main concerns are with the members of our community and the challenges they might be facing in these unprecedented times.

We will be announcing detailed information about the format of the event in the following weeks, but want to inform you about the following changes:

• Remote participation: we will provide technical infrastructure and support to give talks, present posters and demos, run workshops, mentor and receive feedback, discuss and socialise. We hope to reach a much wider audience without the need to travel and the expenses and overheads that come with it.
• Registration fees: we will be able to adjust the registration fees to account for the fact that we will no longer need to cover certain types of expenditure like meeting rooms and catering. Some costs will remain, for instance to cover services such as conference proceedings and organisational support. The registration is due to open at the end of July.
• Dates: the core event will happen between the same days, from Monday October 25th to Wednesday October 29th.
• Sponsors: we are able to offer a whole new range of engagement opportunities for sponsors and participants because of the new format. More information is available here.
• Virtual experience: while we will not be able to welcome you at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision this year, we hope to virtually take you on a visit to the Netherlands. Expect virtual museum tours to explore the gems of Dutch culture, as well as interactive social events.

We’d like to thank you again for supporting the HCOMP community and hope to see you all, virtually or otherwise, in #virtual Netherlands at the end of October!

Yours truly,

The HCOMP2020 team

Producing and hosting the virtual content with Underline

Underline Science will produce and host the virtual content for HCOMP 2020 on underline.io, the world’s first live streaming and digital library platform for cutting-edge conference lectures, research and discussions.

HCOMP 2020 content, including live streams, talks, workshops, poster presentations, demos, slide decks and papers will be available for viewing on underline.io. Attendees will be joining the conference from around the globe. Most content will be available to them during and after the event no matter what time zone they live in. The programme will also include live streams, including the main tracks of the conference, scheduled mostly in the afternoon in Europe to allow for a larger share of the global community to engage. In this way, Underline’s platform maximises scholarship, interactivity and networking opportunities for HCOMP 2020.

Underline is the world’s first virtual conference platform and digital repository for events in academia, science, medicine and other professional fields. Underline’s online video platform is custom-built for scientific and academic events, and their Emmy Award-winning production team is aggregating and hosting conference content in both live and virtual environments, allowing presenters to reach new global audiences while also giving meeting attendees the ability to watch or re-watch any content during and after conferences.