Avoiding "conflicts of interest'': A computational approach to scheduling parallel conference tracks and its human evaluation
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining and Machine Learning
- Keywords
- topic modeling, optimization, conference scheduling
- Copyright
- © 2019 Manda et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Avoiding "conflicts of interest'': A computational approach to scheduling parallel conference tracks and its human evaluation. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27496v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27496v1
Abstract
Conferences with contributed talks grouped into multiple concurrent sessions pose an interesting scheduling problem. From an attendee's perspective, choosing which talks to visit when there are many concurrent sessions is challenging since an individual may be interested in topics that are discussed in different sessions simultaneously. The frequency of topically similar talks in different concurrent sessions is, in fact, a common cause for complaint in post-conference surveys. Here, we introduce a practical solution to the conference scheduling problem by heuristic optimization of an objective function that weighs the occurrence of both topically similar talks in one session and topically different talks in concurrent sessions. Rather than clustering talks based on a limited number of preconceived topics, we employ a topic model to allow the topics to naturally emerge from the corpus of contributed talk titles and abstracts. We then measure the topical distance between all pairs of talks. Heuristic optimization of preliminary schedules seeks to balance the topical similarity of talks within a session and the dissimilarity between concurrent sessions. Using an ecology conference as a test case, we find that simulated annealing improves the objective function over an order of magnitude relative to the schedule manually produced by the program committee. Approximate Integer Linear Programming can be used to provide a partially-optimized starting schedule, but the final value of the discrimination ratio (an objective function used to estimate coherence within a session and disparity between concurrent sessions) is surprisingly insensitive to the starting schedule. Furthermore, we show that, in contrast to the manual process, arbitrary scheduling constraints are straightforward to include. We applied our method to a second biology conference with over 1000 contributed talks plus scheduling constraints. In a randomized experiment, biologists responded similarly to a machine-optimized schedule and a highly modified schedule produced by domain experts on the conference program committee.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science for review.