The COVID-19 pandemic brought work travel and in-person ラーメンベット 登録方法 to a halt, but new research finds this shift has made it easier for more people who could not previously attend these events to participate and lowered their environmental footprint.
A research team led by engineers from The University of Texas at Austin analyzed several science conferences that first went ラーメンベット 登録方法 during the early months of the pandemic. In a new paper, published today in Nature Sustainability, the researchers examined the environmental, social and economic costs of ラーメンベット 登録方法 conferences compared with in-person events and analyzed how the shift online altered participation by women, early-career researchers and scientists from underrepresented institutions and countries.
The study found that ラーメンベット 登録方法 events lower costs and reduce time and travel commitments that have previously held some conferences back from attracting diverse groups of attendees. Also, the environmental costs of hundreds or thousands of people flying from around the world to attend a conference are eliminated.
“When we went ラーメンベット 登録方法, it brought a lot more voices to the table that just weren’t able to be there for in-person events because of cost, time and other reasons,” said Kasey Faust, an assistant professor in the ラーメンベット 禁止ゲーム of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering.
The cost of in-person attendance for scientists from Africa to several recent ラーメンベット 登録方法 was on average between 80% and 250% of their country’s annual per person gross domestic product, compared with approximately 3% of per capita gross domestic product for U.S. participants.
In addition to cost, ラーメンベット 登録方法 events also require tremendous investments in time. These events require travel, often last multiple days and take up all of attendees’ time while they are there.
This can be a major challenge, particularly for women. For many younger workers, this period of life tends to fall around the time many are having children. This makes getting away to ラーメンベット 登録方法 challenging for women, said Faust, who also has two young children.
Women’s participation in ラーメンベット 登録方法 conferences increased as much as 253% compared with previous, in-person conferences, according to the study. And when looking at academia, attendance by students and postdoctoral scholars increased as much as 344%.
The scale of the climate impact is also staggering. The researchers estimate that just a single attendee of an in-person conference in 2019, averaged over the conferences analyzed, had the same environmental footprint as 7,000 ラーメンベット 登録方法 conference attendees.
The researchers said ラーメンベット 登録方法 events open up opportunities for greater international participation, which is limited by cost and travel documentation. For instance, one woman in the study who is a mother of small children said that she did not have the needed travel documents to travel outside her country, keeping her from attending conferences around the world.
“She could network more than she has ever networked in the last year, and that never would have happened with an in-person conference,” said Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental ラーメンベット 登録方法.
The team includes researchers from UT Austin, University of Ottawa, Arizona State University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame and University of Southern California. The ラーメンベット 登録方法 was initially launched to evaluate the unexpectedly successful North American Membrane Society (NAMS) annual meeting in May 2020, one of the first engineering conferences to go ラーメンベット 登録方法. The authors expanded the study to compare in-person with ラーメンベット 登録方法 attendance at the NAMS meeting and several other engineering conferences.
The study found many benefits to ラーメンベット 登録方法 conferences, but challenges remain. Among them are a lack of engagement and missing out on in-person networking. Approximately 75% of attendees at one scientific conference and 96% at another said they preferred in-person networking, and that ラーメンベット 登録方法 sessions felt inauthentic and contrived.
The metrics for engagement improved later in the pandemic as conference tech evolved.One potential fix is shorter sessions and fewer attendees, the researchers said. Also, the authors note that a smaller, more engaged community tends to have better networking and may be the sweet spot for online/hybrid ラーメンベット 登録方法.
Another is the idea of centralized hubs, where people ラーメンベット 登録方法 the same city or region get together somewhere to attend the conference virtually. The researchers likened this to a football or other sporting watch party.
In-person ラーメンベット 登録方法 are beginning to return, but the researchers expect many events to create hybrid offerings, potentially at lower prices.
"Tech companies are already doing this with their ラーメンベット 登録方法," Kumar said. "Smart people will hybridize their ラーメンベット 登録方法 at least to some extent."
