Updates

Indicating Presentation Modality in PCS April 10, 2025

Precision Conference is now open, and we are excited to receive your work! You may notice an additional question in the submission form about presentation modality, and wanted to share our thought processes here and how it will impact the conference.

tl;dr: Planning ASSETS 2025 has required us to make many decisions based on estimates of attendance. Since current events impact travel, we are asking for more information this year to give us a more accurate estimate of attendance, but are doing so in a way that will not impact the review process.

The Cost of Conference Organizing

Organizing any major event is an exercise in future problem solving. Plans for ASSETS 2025 began in early 2024, including decisions about where and when the conference would be held. Suffice it to say that this planning includes making decisions that directly affect the conference budget, such as where the conference will be located and the expected in-person and hybrid attendance. To coordinate the in-person aspects of the conference requires reserving a space (usually a hotel conference center), which entails making commitments to how many rooms the hotel will hold for attendees and how much money will be spent at the hotel on food. Specifically, to secure the space for this conference we committed to the hotel that a minimum number of hotel rooms would be booked by attendees, and that we will purchase at least a certain amount of food.

Accessibility support is a mainstay of our conference, and we have also set aside budgeting for ASL interpreters, CART, and consideration for complementary registration for personal assistants as needed. These items are non-negotiable as far as our expenses are concerned but are sizeable, and adds additional costs that are not necessarily incurred by other conferences of our size (even if we think they should be).

Further, in recent years there have been increasing requests for maintaining and expanding the hybrid experience for ASSETS. In this category we are truly standing on the shoulders of giants, in that the ASSETS 2024 committee did an amazing job of creating a compelling hybrid experience. We have committed to meeting this level of hybrid experience, which itself adds some costs in terms of additional AV setup. This is compounded by the shift to having two parallel tracks for the technical program, which means we need to organize and pay for AV infrastructure twice over.

When brainstorming what we wanted this conference to be, we committed to an accessible physical space and an integrated and accessible hybrid space. Thus, decisions were made in 2024 in line with these expectations.

We note that while these are our core expenses, the conference also incurs other costs, including but not limited to: the fee for Precision Conference (PCS) for paper submissions and reviewing, the cost for Cvent -- the system used to register attendees, and the cost for publishing the proceedings with ACM (i.e. using APTARA to prepare the proceedings).

The Challenges of Traveling in 2025

We understand the realities of the present moment means that some attendees will need to reconsider their travel plans. In 2024, ASSETS attendees participated from 24 countries, and nearly 20% of participants attended online. Past conference virtual fees could be as low as 15% the in-person cost, which required that in-person fees subsidized the cost for hybrid support. Using that cost structure, the conference requires a minimum of in-person attendees to be able to support virtual attendance. While we have worked to restructure our budget to avoid this dependency as much as possible, in-person registration remains closely tied to our ability to support key conference activities. During the past few weeks, we have heard from many of you in the ASSETS community about how the current environment may impact travel plans to attend ASSETS this year. But the plural of anecdote is not data, so we are hoping to gather more information as part of the paper submission process, so that we can make better educated decisions on costs and planning moving forward.

What Has Changed

When submitting your paper in PCS, you will see the following question:

Indicate intent to attend ASSETS in-person or virtually

ASSETS 2025 is offering a hybrid program, and is aiming to plan ahead to better serve attendees. Indicate your answer to the following question using the given scale: At this time, if this paper is accepted, which of the following most closely represents this paper’s authors’ plans to present the paper: Note: The answer to this question will not be shared with paper reviewers and will only be viewable by the technical program chairs and the general chairs. Your answer is nonbinding; we understand that plans change. This question is being asked for planning purposes only.

• At least 1 presenting author plans to attend ASSETS in person.
• At least 1 presenting author plans to attend ASSETS in person, but they may not be able to.
• It is highly likely that none of the authors will attend ASSETS in person.
• None of the authors plan to attend ASSETS in person.

Why This Change

As noted above, our estimates assume a minimum number of in-person attendees to meet expenses for the cost of the hotel, food, and accessibility infrastructure (at the very least). If attendance is lower than expected, that can negatively impact the conference experience and result in overspending our limited budget. On the positive side, the sooner that we can identify potential changes in expected attendance, the more flexibility we have to make adjustments.

We have already made some adjustments to the conference experience using the information that we have, such as adjusting the hybrid registration rates to cover more of our expenses—more on that in a later blog post. But, as mentioned above, depending on in-person attendance numbers, these fees may not offset potential gaps in the budget.

Therefore, to help us estimate future attendance and the associated costs-and in order to try our best to ensure the conference is financially viable-we are gathering as much data as possible when we can. To that end, we’ve asked for some information from submitters about their plans to attend the conference, whether in-person or virtually. Gathering this information will help us to make decisions on how much on-site AV infrastructure is needed, how many tracks (and therefore, how many rooms and ASL interpreters and CART providers) are needed, and how much food to order, etc. Ultimately, it helps us to prepare as much as we can to ensure a successful conference experience no matter how you attend.

Confidentiality and Anonymity

We understand that some may hesitate to share their attendance plans. Only the Technical Program Chairs (TPCs) and General Chairs (GCs) will have access to your responses, and we will only examine them in the aggregate. Our main goal is to try to anticipate how many people may attend in person, and how many may attend virtually. Reviewers will not have access to this information. TPCs and GCs will not have access to individual conflicted papers.

As always, we appreciate all of the members of our community and hope you will participate in ASSETS this year in whatever capacity you are able to. Good luck with your submissions!

Chairs Update March 2025

Hello ASSETS community! This blog from your general chairs, Kristen and Shaun, to provide insight into how the planning process is going and to provide more transparency into how ASSETS functions.

Maintaining our Values of Diversity and Community

It’s an unusual year for a variety of reasons, and we understand there are a lot of questions and a lot of uncertainty. We hope to maintain a dialog with the ASSETS community to communicate the issues that are top of mind for us and the Organizing Committee, and to be transparent about decisions we make regarding the conference in this wild year.

First, it’s worth acknowledging the challenging times we find ourselves in and we understand the future is unknown and very scary for many. We also acknowledge and affirm our values, which we shared with you when we announced ASSETS 2025 at the closing of last year’s conference: we value diversity and innovation, toward building a strong community of researchers who share a passion and drive for accessibility research that changes the world. Our mission in leading ASSETS 2025 is to strengthen community through a welcoming and thought-provoking conference that encourages discussion on challenging topics and inspires groundbreaking research. Simply and in no uncertain terms, we value diversity and community, and we strive to create a welcoming conference.

Adapting to Change

With these changes in mind, we share some of the decisions and discussions we’re having around building an inclusive conference and supporting our community. On the conference planning side, uncertainty that affects conference attendees also affects our projections for attendance and costs.

Clarifying the ASSETS ‘25 Hybrid Experience

For many reasons, we know that in-person travel to Denver, CO for ASSETS 2025 may be affected by current events. Understanding that we do not know how this will impact conference attendance come October, we must remind ourselves of that the main goal of the conference to share research and engage with one another. We also know that the conference policies that we set affect decisions that you may be making around submitting to the conference and attending the conference.

Items that factor into our thinking include the cost for in-person spaces, for audio/visual infrastructure for online participation, and for accessibility support - a non-negotiable mainstay of our conference. Many of these factors depend on your participation and attendance (registration) to support, therefore, it is difficult for us to determine many specifics until we know how many will attend and how they will participate. As an example, our contract with the conference hotel obligates us to a minimum food and beverage budget. If so few people attend in person then we risk not meeting that minimum, and we are obligated to fulfill the balance. These considerations could affect how we coordinate the in-person experiences and set presentation expectations for the conference.

With that in mind, we are making decisions about the conference as early as we can, while accounting for the uncertainty of the current moment. Specifically relating to hybrid, it will be our policy that all accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings, regardless of presentation and attendance modality. Keeping in mind that conference costs are high and expected to increase, at least one author for each published paper will be expected to register at the in-person / presenter rate. We intend to release more details on registration rates soon. We are keeping some options open about when and how virtual presentations will happen, but we do not want you to worry about papers getting pulled due to travel limitations.

We will also be adding some questions as part of the submission process in PCS, for authors to communicate whether they are likely or unlikely to present in person. These are not binding questions, and will not be made available to reviewers, but are intended to improve our estimates of in-person and hybrid attendance only.