Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference contributionResearchpeer review

Authors

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

Research Organisations

External Research Organisations

  • Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IITKGP)
  • Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD)
  • Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
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Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWWW '22
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
Pages2646-2656
Number of pages11
ISBN (electronic)9781450390965
Publication statusPublished - 25 Apr 2022
Event31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022 - Virtual, Online, France
Duration: 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.

Keywords

    Fair Conference Scheduling, Virtual Conference Scheduling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Cite this

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. p. 2646-2656.

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference contributionResearchpeer 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. pp. 2646-2656, 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022, Virtual, Online, France, 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 (pp. 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. p. 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. pp. 2646-2656
Download
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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.",
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