Astrobiology Graduate Conference (AbGradCon) is a NASA-sponsored conference for and by early career scientists interested in the field of astrobiology. The 2021 edition marked the first all-virtual AbGradCon, and it was conducted entirely within Gather.town, a virtual 2D conference space, along with pre-recorded talks on YouTube, and continued discussions and networking via Discord. It was organised by ELSI students and early-career researchers, with an extended committee from students and early career researchers around the world. 119 attendees from 26 countries took part during the meeting, which was held 14-17 September 2021.
The AbGradCon 2021 received 260 applications from 42 countries and 146 abstracts were accepted. During the conference, 36 full presentations and 44 flashtalks were live-streamed. The effort was coordinated with 29 volunteer discussion leaders, including two ELSI graduate students.
All online rooms in Gather.town were designed to parallel a real room at ELSI/Tokyo Tech. Credit Kristin Johnson-Finn. Logo Credit Lucy Kwok (http://be.net/thislucykwok) and the Logo Design Team (Irene Bonati, Thilina Heenatigala, Kristin Johnson-Finn, and Paula Prondzinsky).
In-person to online transition
A team of ELSI researchers and students originally proposed to host AbGradCon in 2020 at ELSI, and had been planning the in-person conference since early 2018. Due to unavoidable circumstances of the pandemic in Japan and around the world, the conference was not held in 2020, and needed to pivot completely to a fully digital meeting in 2021. The new digital conference was organised with the original AbGradCon goals in mind: career building, providing a safe environment for early career researchers to present in a low-stress environment of their peers, and highlighting the interdisciplinarity and internationality of astrobiology. This conference is sometimes the first formal meeting where a student will present their research, and as such, the organisers wanted it to maintain the key components that make AbGradCon meaningful and purposeful for students and early career researchers even though the meeting would be held 100% online.
As such, the conference included online workshops on science communication as part of the career building goals (organized by AbGradCon partner Explainables, https://www.explainables.org/). The traditional proposal writing retreat (PWR) was also replaced by a newly conceptualized proposal reviewing panel and budgeting exercise to provide important experience in proposal preparation while adjusting to the online format.
Discord server was used for asynchronous discussions throughout the conference, and it remains open for future use. Credit: Tony Z. Jia.
The plenary room was used for the intro/closing, keynote sessions, announcements, and live-streamed pre-recorded presentations from the attendees. Credit: Tony Z. Jia.
A major challenge of the virtual meeting was balancing time-zones, especially for networking of participants. As such, two separate sessions were held each day at different times so that participants around the world could join at least one session during the day, hopefully encouraging as much live participation as possible. Presentations were also made available for viewing anytime outside of the set conference times via private Youtube video links (organized and uploaded by NASA staff, Mike Toillion) and a Discord server was also setup for asynchronous discussions during and after the conference sessions. This allowed access to the conference content at any given time during the conference, promoting interaction between and amongst participants based on ehtir scheules. However, the conference organising team took precautions to keep unpublished or non-publicly disclosable information presented or discussed during the meeting from being shared publicly without consent of the specific presenter through a code of conduct agreement that all participants agreed to. Participants were also provided a choice to have their contributed presentation deleted after the meeting or archived in perpetuity on the NASA Astrobiology Youtube channel, which were published recently.
Providing an opportunity for all participants to present their research during the meeting was prioritised, especially as many other conferences prioritize oral presentations for established senior faculty rather than early career researchers and students, limiting their opportunities. In order for AbGradCon participants to gain experience presenting in a formal conference setting, all attendees were given the option to provide a 12-minute pre-recorded oral presentation accessible on Youtube; some of these presentations were chosen to be live-streamed during the meeting, followed by a live Q&A session with the presenter. Additionally, traditional in-person meeting poster sessions are held for those who will not present talks. A poster session format is very challenging for online meetings, so it organizers opted to allow all participants to contribute a pre-recorded 1-minute flashtalk presentation in lieu of a poster; this also allowed attendees who did not elect to submit a 12-minute presentation to submit some form of oral presentation for the meeting.
Small group discussions were a key feature of this meeting, with help from the volunteer discussion leaders (some of whom were leading discussions for the first time!). Credit: Tony Z. Jia.
With a digital conference, there is the worry of “Zoom fatigue”, which results from oversubscription of online meetings without tools or processes for realtime engagement or discussion with other attendees (something that is really important for in-person meetings), leading to less attendance and lower enthusiasm for the meeting. To combat this issue, organisers switched to a few tools that presumably could lead to better participant engagement than Zoom. The Gather.town platform was used as the main conference platform as direct interactions between participants were more streamlined and available for self-organization (by the participants) than Zoom. A Discord server was used as the ‘chat-based’ communication which allowed the participants jump into a discussion or catch up with an on-going one at their own pace.
All of the information was also centralised through a conference booklet so that participants could find all the information needed about the meeting in one place at any time.
Theme and scope
As this was the first instance that AbGradCon was hosted in Asia, the organisers decided that the conference theme should be international collaboration to highlight astrobiology research around the world. In this vein, the time-zones of all scientific sessions were designed so that at least two regions (from Europe, Asia/Oceania, and the Americas) could attend any one session to increase potential for international collaboration between the participants. The keynote speakers and pre-conference workshop leaders were also chosen due to their extensive experience in international collaboration, both of whom have worked in multiple regions around the world.
Key logistical aspects
Most online conference formats are not suitable for increasing engagement amongst the participants, rather focusing on a series of presentations. As all participants are students and early career researchers, a key goal of AbGradCon traditionally has been the development of a cohort of peers to network with throughout one’s career, leading to long-term collaborations and career opportunities. Therefore, the organisers designed the conference, the programme, the schedule, and the platforms, to allow for the networking and career building opportunities.
Online platforms: conference used two separate online platforms: Gather.town and Discord. Gather.town was used for main sessions and direct video/voice discussions. Discord was used for announcements and text-based discussions which could lead to direct meetings in and out of Gather.town during and after the meeting. Participants also had separate networking meetings in both platforms to continue discussions.
Pre-conference activities: the conference organisers prepared four career building activities before the meeting. Two of these workshops educated participants on the scientific proposal preparation and evaluation process (proposal review panel and proposal budgeting exercise), and two were Science Communication workshops on marketing/branding and communication, facilitated by professional science communicators (Explainables). The science communicators also produced two additional videos for the participants to view on presentation preparation and an expansion on the marketing/branding workshop.
Discussions: group discussions are a key mechanism to directly connect participants and to engage in deep and thought-provoking scientific discussions. After the conclusion of sessions for the day, discussion groups (led by volunteer discussion leaders) were held in breakout rooms to address topics related to those during the talks. Some of these topics were proposed as unanswered questions in the field, and some discussions even led to proposals of more unanswered questions in astrobiology worth pursuing in the future.
Conference goods: through partners around the world, conference gift bags were arranged for participants who had interest in receiving one. These included small items provided by the sponsors meant to provide pre-conference excitement and a tangible item associated with participation in the meeting.
Conference photo. Credit: Tony Z. Jia.
Comments
“I’m glad that the meeting was able to go ahead digitally with few problems, and that the hard work of all of the organizers was able to lead to an apparently fruitful meeting for most of the participants. Originally, many of the organizers had been worried about “Zoom fatigue”, and so I’m glad that the conference format and platforms (Gather.town and Discord) were able to provide something that other online meetings may not have been able to provide with respect to direct interactions between participants.” – Tony Z. Jia, co-chair of AbGradCon2021
“When I decided to be a facilitator of AbGradCon 2020, I wanted the meeting to be an opportunity for early-career astrobiology researchers to network with their peers and learn new skills that could help them in their presentations and careers. When we went online in 2021, we tried the best we could to still meet those goals in uncharted territory. Through a combination of pre-meeting workshops, a conference platform built to feel like a physical conference location (Gather.town) and an online forum for discussions and resource sharing (Discord), I think we were successful! It was challenging to reach the finish line during this period of history, but through the efforts of our organizing team, partners, and volunteers, we were able to create a conference that I genuinely feel proud to be a part of. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible. Good luck in 2022!” – Kristin Johnson, co-chair of AbGradCon2021
Stay tuned to https://www.abgradcon.org/ for updates on the next AbGradCon, whichwill be held in Summer 2022 in Washington, DC.
Acknowledgements
The organisers wish to thank all of the sponsors and partners of AbGradCon 2021 for their continued support: Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the NASA Astrobiology Program, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas Aquaplanetology (17H06454), the Astrobiology Center (ABC) Program of Japan National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), the ELSI-FirstLogic Astrobiology Donation Program (EFADP), Astrobiology Australasian Meeting 2020, AbGradE, Explainables, Astrobiology Club, Astrobiology Society of Asia-Pacific (ASAP), Life, Breakthrough Listen, Greenspace, and SSOEL: Astrobiology-Japan. We would further like to thank the keynote speakers H. Yabuta (Hiroshima University) and A. Antunes (State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences at Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST)), the Explainables Team (D. Angerhausen, A. Salleh, J. John), M. Neveu (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Kirven-Brooks (NASA), A. Gronstal (NASA), M. Toillion (NASA), A. Sato (ELSI), H. Ricciardi (ELSI), H. Tanaka (ELSI), K. Akiyama (ELSI), R. Hattori (ELSI), L. Kwok (ELSI), S. Som and J. Haqq-Misra of BMSIS, D. Klock (Greenspace), J. DeMarines (Breakthrough Listen), K. Aguilar (Breakthrough Listen), A. Siemion (Breakthrough Listen), the various discussion leaders of the conference (A. Mojarro, K. Matange, M. Naseem, D. Phillips, K. Miller, R. Mizuuchi, M. Macey, S. Sarkar, S. Biswas, M. Schaible, R. Archer, S. Borges, G. Schaible, A. Deal, L. Schwander, Y.A. Takagi, C. Walton, A. Kahana, S. Choi, D. Buckner, B. Kang, Y. He, S. Nishikawa, S. Sharma, and A. Verma), and all of the organizers (T. Z. Jia, K. N. Johnson-Finn, P. Prondzinsky, H. B. Smith, I. Bonati, K. W. Lim, K. Fujishima, N. Noda, Y. Li, A. Ceja, J. McGonigle, L. Vincent, N. Grefenstette, N. V. Bapat, P. Penev, S. Vissapragada, T. Roche, O. Alian, and W. Takahagi).