tl;dr we launched a seminar series where you can present your research any time, and I invite you check it out and apply here.
Online seminars now
Thanks to the lockdown, in the past months we learned that onine talks are actually quite alright.
They work at all scales: conference sessions, colloquia, and informal group meeting talks.
Many researchers prefer good old offline talks, but I doubt anyone would claim that the online ones are actually unworkable.
At the same time the online talks are a carbon copy of the offline ones, and follow the same routine.
- Somebody runs a series of seminars or a conference session
- They think of a speaker they’d like to invite
- Typically this speaker is senior
- The speaker likely has a talk ready, and probably has given it a couple of times in the last couple of months
- The speaker accepts, the organizers send an announcement, the talk continues, and we’re back to step 1.
OK, the image is a gross exagerration, but my point is that the whole thing could be better.
Flipping the online seminars
Consider: when would it make most sense for you or anyone else to give a talk?
I believe the moment is when you have something worthwhile to say. For example you just finished a research project and put it online.
Who should decide that you should give an online talk?
Clearly you know best when you’re ready, so you’re the one to decide. Offline talks are hard to organize: availability of the room and a packed schedule make it impossible for you to give a talk whenever you like. But online there are no obstacles!
How should this talk be organized?
While online talks are easy to run, they still take effort. You need to reserve a zoom room. If the talk is public, you want participants to register so that you avoid zoom bombing. Then you need some place to publish the recording, etc.
So? What’s the summary?
It would be great if:
- We had a place that any research could use to give a talk
- That place would take care of most of the routine
So instead of waiting, we made it!
The Speakers’ corner seminar series are exactly what I described. Whenever you have a story to share—register there, invite your audience, and tell it.
Some extra remarks:
- To avoid too exotic presentations, we moderate the content by requiring that each talk is based on an arXiv preprint
- I think a cool application of this is linking the talk video from the comments section on arXiv. Because who has patience to read nowadays
About us
The Speakers’ corner is a part of
We are a volunteer organization accommodating, organizing, and searching for best practices in online seminars.
We’re supported by
