Confer: A Conference Recommendation and Meetup Tool

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’16 Companion, February 27 March 02, 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA ACM 978-1-4503-3950-6/16/02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2874340 Abstract One of the primary goals of academic conferences is to promote scientific exchange of advances among people who may otherwise not have the opportunity to hear from one another. We present Confer, a tool designed to help conference attendees find interesting papers and talks, discover and meet people with shared interests, and manage their time using a personalized schedule for the conference. So far, we have deployed Confer to 17 academic conferences including several years of CHI and CSCW. Confer is also the primary program tool for CSCW 2016. Log analysis and survey results have shown that the tool helps conference attendees find interesting papers and manage their schedule. Furthermore the recommendation data generated from the tool has been used by conference organizers to help plan conference schedules as well as to organize social gatherings. Finally, the meetup feature seeks to help conference attendees reach out to other attendees with similar interests.