Connectionists: Cosyne Viewing Parties

[William Dorrell]

Cosyne Viewing Parties

Cosyne is the preeminent computational neuroscience conference, but a
variety of factors limit in-person attendance. Cosyne talks are streamed on
youtube, but watching days of talks on your laptop is an agonising way to
an aneurism. Cosyne is making videos available online, which offers a third
way: regional gatherings that provide partial conference benefits at
partial cost. This email provides motivation, and information on how to
attend a Cosyne Viewing Party or host your own. For current map of viewing
parties see: https://shorturl.at/3DHZX

Some Motivation: Costs, visa restrictions, and personal responsibilities
can make flying round the world to attend a conference impossible. Further,
flights contribute around 2.5% of yearly CO2 emissions (and their
proportion of warming is even higher, due to contrails and the altitude of
emission), but, unlike most other major sources of emissions, there is no
feasible green drop-in replacement for flying. This makes reducing flying a
key part of almost all realistic net-zero plans.

The Idea: Viewing Parties will run alongside the main conference in Lisbon.
They will allow people to gather, capturing some of the advantages of an
in-person conference, while making logistics easier and greener. The
details are flexible: at its simplest, it can involve hiring a room and
screening the talks for an audience who can then discuss what they see.
More elaborate versions might draw people from across a large area (e.g.
all of South Africa, or the Eastern US) and host poster sessions, social
events, or additional discussions alongside talk screenings. This has
already worked for ICML, CCN, and NeurIPS.

*Host*: Hosting can be easy! Simply book a room at your local institution
and screen the talks. The talks will be livestreamed on Cosyne’s YouTube
channel. To deal with timezone differences you can either rewind during the
stream, or simply watch the videos after they are uploaded at the end of
the session. Additional efforts that might improve the experience include
coffee/food, a poster session, organised social events, or additional panel
discussions. To register with us and appear on our map (allowing people to
find you) email `dorrellwec at gmail.com' with the following information:


   -

   Where will the Cosyne Viewing Party be hosted?
   -

   How can people attend?
   -

   Contact details - who are you?
   -

   (Optional) Information on the additional events, link to a corresponding
   webpage, or an invitation to bring posters/talks etc.
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