Important Notices Regarding the COVID-19 Pandemic
[Update April 1]
Letter from the Chair
Dear CogSIMA Community:
On March 10, the CogSIMA Organizing Committee made the decision to postpone the CogSIMA 2020 conference from May 4-7, 2020 to sometime in August or September. Since that decision, we have seen the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 grow from 113,000 to 700,000 and the number of COVID-19 deaths grow from 4,000 to 33,000.
The Organizing Committee met again on Monday March 30 to discuss setting a specific date for the conference. Given the great deal of uncertainty about both the safety of our environment and the financial stability of the world, we made the decision to not have a face to face conference for 2020, and instead to have a completely virtual conference. We are very excited as this puts us on a path to make sure that the outstanding collection of papers created for this conference will have the opportunity to be presented and published, in a timely manner.
We have decided that the Virtual CogSIMA 2020 will start on Monday August 24, 2020. We will be working on the design of the virtual conference beginning immediately. We recognize that we have a pretty significant time zone challenge, so we are not planning to have full day (8 hour) sessions. We are thinking that we could offer a 4 hour session each day, which would mean that the full conference could last longer than a week. This would include keynote presentations, paper presentation sessions, a poster session, and tutorials and workshops.
Even though we will not be holding the event at the University of Victoria, we will still be recognizing them as our host. We will ensure that attendees will have lots of opportunity to experience Victoria virtually.
This will be an experiment. We plan to use a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and we are also planning to bring some additional material to the audience, which we believe will enhance the overall experience for both the presenters and audience.
While this approach offers challenges, it also presents the opportunity to expose the excellent work and scientific advances of our community like never before. As we look at what new options are made available by going digital, we are considering ways in which presentations can be broadcast to a greater audience than would normally be possible, opening up new avenues for presenters to be recognized.
As we work through the design of this virtual conference we have to ask new questions. What is most important to the Organizing Committee is that the authors that created this great collection of papers should have the honor of both presenting that work and also having that work published.
Be on the lookout for more information about the conference, as we work through the design of this new, exciting Virtual CogSIMA 2020.
Thank you,
Scott Fouse
Chair, CogSIMA 2020 Conference
[Update March 10]
Responding to the current situation on the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak ("novel coronavirus" causing the COVID-19 disease), we have decided to postpone CogSIMA 2020. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but please understand that we are taking our social responsibility and the health and well-being of our conference attendees very seriously.
Therefore, we are pleased to announce that we still intend to hold the conference as in the form of a physical event at the University of Victoria, but are looking for new dates. We are currently exploring alternative dates in the August/September 2020 timeframe, and will provide further updates on this as soon as possible.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact admin@cogsima.org.
Best regards,
the CogSIMA 2020 organizers
