About

Conferences are important for sharing research and helping global collaboration, but doing so presents a complex logistical challenge: choosing a location. The venue directly impacts attendee travel costs, time, and accessibility, making the decision crucial for ensuring maximum participation.

PickMyConference offers a data-driven approach to this problem. Our mapping tool analyzes takes into account conference participation to suggest a geographically optimal location that aims to minimize overall travel burden for attendees. By gathering coordinates of author affiliations from their associated publications, we calculate the geometric median–the point that minimizes total travel distance for all participants. The tool then identifies the nearest major city to this point, providing a practical venue suggestion.

Our goal is to provide conference organizers with a tool that helps make a more strategic and inclusive location decision. By visualizing a geographic center of a research community, we can help reduce the collective travel burden as well as increase venue attendance. Explore our map below to see the tool in action.

Maps

This map shows the locations of various conference events.

Findings

To demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool, we looked at data from the Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) conference. Please click the "ASPLOS" option in the map dropdown to view the relevant data.

Key Results:

• The actual conference was held in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
• Our analysis of the author affiliations identified Brooklyn, USA as the most central venue.
• The map shows an especially heavy concentration of contributing authors in North America/Western half of the world. This explains the algorithm's choice of New York City, as it mathematically minimizes the travel distance for the largest number of participants.

These findings demonstrate that a data-driven approach can identify more centrally located venues, maximizing attendee participation.

Poster

Here is the poster we will (have) present(ed) during the URV Poster and Talk Session!