IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2020 - 82

Figure 1. The 1 June plenary panel.

technically and with respect to the time
zone differences, as our audience
spanned from Japan to California and
even farther. Holding these talks asynchronously while retaining the possibility to make changes efficiently pushed
us to look for a well-developed corporate communication framework. Hence,
we settled on Slack. Although not
designed for this purpose, Slack offers a
very interesting set of tools, such as
multichannel chat threads, integration
with major video conferencing tools,
member administration, and so on.
During the lockdown, its usage rose
considerably in a few months, and, as a
growing number of institutions and labs
adopted it, many participants were
already familiar with the platform.
The IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society (RAS) also has a couple of digital tools previously used for conferences; these were upgraded for the
purpose. PaperCept, which has been
used extensively for paper submissions
and proceedings at RAS conferences,
and InfoVaya, the platform used as a
companion app and personal scheduler,
all went through major developments
to provide a backbone for the online
conference. The Organizing Committee
is very grateful to both teams for their
support and the countless hours they
spent on these developments on such
short notice.
To implement this asynchronous
approach, we then asked our speakers
to record a video of their presentation
to be distributed to all attendees at the
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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

launch of the conference. We set up a
chat channel for each paper on Slack,
where all interested parties could ask
questions and discuss them with the
presenters. Fortunately, Slack has an
accessible application programming
interface, which allowed for the creation
of these 1,500 channels, linking each to
the paper's PDF and presentation. An
additional advantage stemming from
the use of Slack is the ease with which
one can chat and reach out to others.
Additionally, the upcoming generation
of young roboticists is apparently quite
comfortable with this mode of communication. More than 6,000 messages
were exchanged on the first day of the
conference. Moreover, the community
quickly played along and spontaneously
came up with novel propositions, such
as focused topic discussion channels,
online happy hour meetings, sessions of

Figure 2. Plenary Speaker and IEEE Fellow
Lydia E. Kavraki presented " Planning in
Robotics and Beyond " on 2 June 2020.

DECEMBER 2020

binge-watching presentation videos,
and so forth. It was a true joy to see the
young generation getting involved so
readily and starting to animate the
online space.
Another advantage of adopting this
asynchronous communication was that
it enabled us to extend the originally
planned five-day period to three
months. Hoping that little maintenance
would be required once things were on
the rails technically, an extension until
the end of August became possible.
However, an important piece of the puzzle was how to maintain the original
conference feel. We focused on plenary
and keynote talks, which attract a large
audience and are always the high points
of ICRA. We turned to IEEE.tv for a
real-time video-streaming solution. As
matter of fact, IEEE.tv has been quietly
growing for the past several years and
has progressed from hosting prerecorded talks to providing real-time discussions and Q&A tools. ICRA 2020
took advantage of this real-time opportunity, as we scheduled a plenary or keynote talk for each day of the conference
over two weeks during midday hours in
Europe, the only time period roughly
convenient for everyone from Japan to
California. In total, an opening plenary
panel on COVID-19 (see Figure 1) and
12 talks were broadcast (see Figures 2
and 3), which incited lively responses.
Because these live events did not require
registration to participate, they attracted
an audience of approximately 1,500 for
some presentations, each was followed
by intense Q&A sessions, and recordings of the proceedings have surpassed
20,000 viewings as of today.
The RAS staff and the Student Activities Committee organized online
events to enliven the social activities.
Thanks to our community's members'
willingness to participate in the games,
the traditional Lunch with Leaders was
moved online. The Robot Trivia, SAC
Logo Contest Video Challenges, and
Women in Engineering events were all
moved online and were a great success.
The first-ever virtual RAS Town Hall
Meeting was also held.
On the workshops' front, most
remained with ICRA and adapted their

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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2020

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