Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction

Publikation: Beitrag in Buch/Bericht/Sammelwerk/KonferenzbandAufsatz in KonferenzbandForschungPeer-Review

Autoren

  • Gourab K. Patro
  • Prithwish Jana
  • Abhijnan Chakraborty
  • Krishna P. Gummadi
  • Niloy Ganguly

Organisationseinheiten

Externe Organisationen

  • Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IITKGP)
  • Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD)
  • Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Forschungs-netzwerk anzeigen

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
Titel des SammelwerksWWW '22
UntertitelProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
Seiten2646-2656
Seitenumfang11
ISBN (elektronisch)9781450390965
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 25 Apr. 2022
Veranstaltung31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022 - Virtual, Online, Frankreich
Dauer: 25 Apr. 202229 Apr. 2022

Abstract

Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches.

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Zitieren

Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction. / Patro, Gourab K.; Jana, Prithwish; Chakraborty, Abhijnan et al.
WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022. 2022. S. 2646-2656.

Publikation: Beitrag in Buch/Bericht/Sammelwerk/KonferenzbandAufsatz in KonferenzbandForschungPeer-Review

Patro, GK, Jana, P, Chakraborty, A, Gummadi, KP & Ganguly, N 2022, Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction. in WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022. S. 2646-2656, 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022, Virtual, Online, Frankreich, 25 Apr. 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.12062, https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512136
Patro, G. K., Jana, P., Chakraborty, A., Gummadi, K. P., & Ganguly, N. (2022). Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction. In WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (S. 2646-2656) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.12062, https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512136
Patro GK, Jana P, Chakraborty A, Gummadi KP, Ganguly N. Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction. in WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022. 2022. S. 2646-2656 doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2204.12062, 10.1145/3485447.3512136
Patro, Gourab K. ; Jana, Prithwish ; Chakraborty, Abhijnan et al. / Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly : Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction. WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022. 2022. S. 2646-2656
Download
@inproceedings{3a1fc61510b745409b03a57c63359c0f,
title = "Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction",
abstract = "Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches.",
keywords = "Fair Conference Scheduling, Virtual Conference Scheduling",
author = "Patro, {Gourab K.} and Prithwish Jana and Abhijnan Chakraborty and Gummadi, {Krishna P.} and Niloy Ganguly",
note = "Funding Information: This research has been supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020AAA0106600, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 62176014, U1836206.; 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022 ; Conference date: 25-04-2022 Through 29-04-2022",
year = "2022",
month = apr,
day = "25",
doi = "10.48550/arXiv.2204.12062",
language = "English",
pages = "2646--2656",
booktitle = "WWW '22",

}

Download

TY - GEN

T1 - Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly

T2 - 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022

AU - Patro, Gourab K.

AU - Jana, Prithwish

AU - Chakraborty, Abhijnan

AU - Gummadi, Krishna P.

AU - Ganguly, Niloy

N1 - Funding Information: This research has been supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020AAA0106600, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 62176014, U1836206.

PY - 2022/4/25

Y1 - 2022/4/25

N2 - Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches.

AB - Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches.

KW - Fair Conference Scheduling

KW - Virtual Conference Scheduling

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129847954&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2204.12062

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2204.12062

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85129847954

SP - 2646

EP - 2656

BT - WWW '22

Y2 - 25 April 2022 through 29 April 2022

ER -