Panos Ipeirotis writes in his blog post:
Everyone who has attended a conference knows that the quality of the talks is very uneven. There are talks that are highly engaging, entertaining, and describe nicely the research challenges and solutions. And there are talks that are a waste of time. Either the presenter cannot present clearly, or the presented content is impossible to digest within the time frame of the presentation.
We already have reviewing for the written part. The program committee examines the quality of the written paper and vouch for its technical content. However, by looking at a paper it is impossible to know how nicely it can be presented. Perhaps the seemingly solid but boring paper can be a very entertaining presentation. Or an excellent paper may be written by a horrible presenter.
Why not having a second round of reviewing, where the authors of accepted papers submit their presentations (slides and a YouTube video) for presentation to the conference. The paper will be accepted and be included in the proceedings anyway but having a paper does not mean that the author gets a slot for an oral presentation.
Under an oral presentation peer review, a committee looks at the presentation, votes on accept/reject and potentially provides feedback to the presenter. The best presentations get a slot on the conference program.
While I’ve enjoyed quiet time for meditation during boring talks, this is a very interesting idea – cost permitting. As the cost of producing a paper and a presentation to pass peer review goes into weeks, a lot of super-interesting early-stage research just moves off the radar.
I guess that the question is if the conference is there for the speakers ('for the papers'), or for the audience. If we want to put *more* resources into improving *good* papers, we should select on papers, not on speakers.
I also guess that keynote speakers *are* often selected on their presentation abilities as well.
I wholeheartedly agree that there's a problem. But I'd settle for some online reviews of past presentations. No sense making the submission processes any sillier than they already are.
Ken Church had a great position paper on a related issue: under most review schemes, papers that nobody cares much about seem to be the easiest to get accepted. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0…
This idea might be interesting, but I think it totally misses the idea of oral presentations at conferences.
Conferences are for meeting people and exchanging ideas – that is what brings research forward. Having a reviewing process will destroy most of it.
What about being provocative and spontaneous? The reviewing would destroy all of this spice.
What is the point of a conference, which essentially gives us journal papers read aloud?
Wait – I get the paper accepted in any case. But if I spend a week or two practising and perfecting a presentation, figure out how to film myself giving it, put it up on YouTube for anyone to see, then I may get a shot at presenting it orally in front of a hundred people, ninety of which are busy checking email or sleeping off last nights conference dinner?
Or, I can blow off the video (if it's mandatory I could make a thirty second clip of myself trying to burp the title), and spend the conference talking about my work with people who are genuinely interested, taking the time I need, focusing on the bits of common interest? And still get the conference publication?
Good luck on getting those video submissions.
It helps to make more of the conference presentations posters and not talks. This makes it easier for presenter/audience to meet and exchange ideas, and easier for the audience to get away from awful presentations.
Interesting idea. But conferences want to make it easier for people to spend an insane amount of money to attend (conference fees are, in my experience, shamefully, shamefully high), not harder. fyi, i'm speaking about economics conferences.
On that note, I think the regular youtube-less "peer review" process for some conferences is a stretch. I went to one where the organizer joked "we received 700 submissions, and accepted 800 papers!". I thought this was hilarious, but also kind of a sad commentary.
On a personal level, I'd never want to do this youtube thing.
What Martin said.
That's a terrible idea. At the end, what people remember is the paper, not the presentation. If some topics are too complex to be presented in a 15 minuts Power Point presentation, then the problem is of the audience, which is unable to digest complex concepts. We should realize that some concepts are too complex to be delivered in a presentation.
I wholeheartedly agree with Francisco: conference audiences are to blame for bad talks. I especially hate it when I'm giving a conference presentation, and in the middle of flashing up my tables of simulation studies, and I can so tell the audience totally fail to appreciate all the information on the table quick enough—it's like they're not concentrating or something. Sometimes I even wonder whether they're even trying to remember all my notation, which is so frustrating as it takes much effort on my part to make all those 30-odd letters intuitive.