I attended at the 35th
Multi-Service Networks Workshop at the Cosener's House in Abingdon
last week, along with most of my research group (except for Vivian, who's
currently on an internship at IIJ
Research Laboratory in Tokyo). It was great to catch up with people
again after several years of online attendance during the pandemic
— this is one meeting that benefits from being there in-person!
I recently attended my first in-person only conference, that did not
also allow remote participation, since the pandemic started. In many
ways it felt good to return to normal. I understand why people want to
go back to in-person events.
And, while I think most people involved would agree that running
events online was certainly better than cancelling everything during
the COVID lock downs, few would call a fully online conference a good
experience. While presentations and structured panel discussions can
work well online, the social aspects of the conference are hard, if not
impossible, to replicate and are an essential part of the event. There
is a strong case to be made for in-person events.
But, are we sure we want to go back to running conferences exactly as they
were before the pandemic?
The ACM/IRTF Applied Networking
Research Workshop 2023 (ANRW’23),
co-located with IETF 117,
is the eigth edition of an academic workshop that provides a forum
for researchers, vendors, network operators, and the Internet standards
community to present and discuss emerging results in applied networking
research.