Dear attendees,
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the first-ever virtual ISCA! We believe the ecosystem we have put together will allow you to get the maximum out of this worldwide event. Here we would like to tell you a little about how things will work out.
Event Schedule: Main track events will take place at three different time slots each day, Monday through Wednesday (June 1–3). (We are still working out the details of workshops and tutorials.)
Technical Sessions: All technical sessions will comprise three components:
Mini-Panel "Coffee Breaks": What could be better than a controversial panel on a hot research topic? How about a dozen panels? We have put together thirty-minute mini-panels, two at the end of each technical session. Their goal is to seed community discussion on topics that were "hot" among this year's paper submissions. These will be broadcast live as well, and the interaction with each panel will be through its own Q&A forum and discussion board. will be typically Program Committee members, and each panel has been given latitude to self-organize.
Discussion Boards: As you may have noticed, every event has an associated discussion board (this is an obvious nod to our ASPLOS 2020 colleagues). Attendees will have access to all discussion boards from a week before the event through at least the end of June. Importantly, attendees will be able to form their own discussion boards. (This includes a discussion board about job opportunities.) We recognize that this may lead to a myriad of them, but we'd rather err on the side of letting attendees take discussions wherever they want. Think about it as zig-zagging around groups of people chatting during coffee breaks, trying to find one that looks interesting to you.
One-on-One Contact: The platform allows all attendees to fill out a "virtual business card" (this includes a LinkedIn profile, which can optionally be used to log into the platform), and to share it with others. It also makes it easy to search for other listed attendees and to contact them.
Registration Cost: ACM/IEEE member registration is US $30; student and life members receive a 50% discount. Registration for non-members is USD $60 and USD $30, respectively. Although it may seem that the ideal registration cost for a virtual event is zero, we do not believe this is the case:
We are actually very excited at the low registration cost—about 5% of the cost of attending a physical conference. This was possible in part by SIGARCH's and TCCA's generous support at a moment's notice. Our hope is that many more people will register to the conference as a result of its low cost (plus the savings from not having to travel). In particular, we are hoping that it will enable research groups to have every single student participate.
Availability of Technical Contributions: For the main track, we have negotiated with the IEEE Computer Society a very attractive dissemination plan that will ensure technical contributions are widely accessible:
We would like to reiterate our excitement at the prospect of welcoming you to ISCA 2020. We hope that this setup will prove engaging, and that it will encourage everyone to register and help us make this a truly unique event, by posing and voting on questions for all presenters, and by contributing to the mini-panels and discussion boards.
See you soon,
José Martínez and José Duato,
General Co-chairs
Lieven Eeckhout, Program Chair