Online Event Research Articles

Planning virtual and hybrid events: steps to improve inclusion and accessibility

Abstract. The past decade has seen a global transformation in how we communicate and connect with one another, making it easier to network and collaborate with colleagues worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a rapid and unplanned shift toward virtual platforms, resulting in several accessibility challenges that have excluded many people during virtual events. Virtual and hybrid conferences have the potential to present opportunities and collaborations to groups previously excluded from purely in-person conference formats. This can only be achieved through thoughtful and careful planning with inclusion and accessibility in mind, learning lessons from previous events' successes and failures. Without effective planning, virtual and hybrid events will replicate many biases and exclusions inherent to in-person events. This article provides guidance on best practices for making online/virtual and hybrid events more accessible based on the combined experiences of diverse groups and individuals who have planned and run such events. Our suggestions focus on the accessibility considerations of three event planning stages: (1) pre-event planning, (2) on the day/during the event, and (3) after the event. Ensuring accessibility and inclusivity in designing and running virtual events can help everyone engage more meaningfully, resulting in more impactful discussions that will more fully include contributions from the many groups with limited access to in-person events. However, while this article is intended to act as a starting place for inclusion and accessibility in online and hybrid event planning, it is not a fully comprehensive guide. As more events are run, it is expected that new insights and experiences will be gained, helping to continually update standards.

Digital Reconstruction: A Critical Examination of the History and Adaptation of Ku Klux Klan Websites.

In response to the data revolution, academic research and media attention have increasingly focused on the technological adaptation and innovation displayed by the far right. The greatest attention is paid to social media and how groups and organizations are utilizing technological advancement and growth in virtual networks to increase recruitment and advance radicalization on a global scale. As with most social and political endeavors, certain technologies are in vogue and thus draw the attention of users and regulators and service providers. This creates a technological blind spot within which extremist groups frequently operate older and less well regarded technologies without the oversight that one might expect. This article examines the less well-studied traditional and official websites of the Ku Klux Klan, the most established and iconic of American far-right organizations. By incorporating non-participant observation of online spaces and thematic analysis, this research analyzes the evolution of 26 websites, from their emergence in the early 1990s to the present day. We examine the ways in which traditional printed communications and other ephemera have progressed with advances in technology, focusing on the following central elements of Klan political activism and community formation: Klan identity, organizational history, aims and objectives; technology and outreach, including online merchandise and event organization; and the constructions of whiteness and racism. The results add value and insight to comparable work by offering a unique historical insight into the ways in which the Klan have developed and made use of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web3 technologies.

Student's Priorities When Selecting Web Conferencing Tools in Sri Lankan Tertiary Education

A properly selected web conferencing tool can significantly enhance student engagement, motivation, and learning outcomes in online education. Hence, this study aims to produce a framework ordering the key features and associated sub-factors of web conferencing tools that Sri Lankan tertiary sector students prioritize for their online learning experience. A quantitative research method is deployed to get the student's opinions on the factors discovered in a previous study on “Expert opinion on selecting a web conferencing tool for synchronous online tertiary education in Sri Lanka”. The research hypothesis was tested using the Pearson Chi-square test, followed by exploratory and second-order factor analysis to rank the importance of sub-factors and main characteristics. The findings revealed that students prioritize collaboration features the most, followed by online event features, pricing, user-friendliness, customer support, security, online evaluation, performance, and screen-sharing. This framework offers valuable insights for Sri Lankan tertiary institutions to select web conferencing tools that truly align with student preferences. By incorporating these student-centric considerations, institutions can optimize the online learning experience, leading to improved engagement, learning outcomes, and ultimately, greater student satisfaction.

Online e-sports event viewers' intention to visit the destination

The main aim of this study is to elucidate the impact of hedonic motivations and habits of e-sports viewers on their intention to visit. The second one is to test the mediating role of individuals' attitudes on this stated impact. The data were collected through face-to-face and online between May 26, 2022, and November 15, 2023. At the end of the data collection process, 438 survey forms were obtained. As a result of the conducted analyses, it was found that hedonic motivation and habit variables have a significant and positive impact on attitude and the intention to visit. Moreover, attitudes mediate the relationship between the intention to visit and both hedonic motivation and habit. In the context of the obtained findings suggested to emphasize aspects that bring fun, pleasure, and enjoyment in e-sports activities. Another recommendation is to provide information to e-sports viewers, especially through individual or social media channels, about e-sports events and the destinations where the events are organized in promotional activities.

Design and Implementation of an Efficient Event Management Portal: Enhancing Operational Consistency and Growth

Abstract- Event management has become an increasingly complex task, requiring efficient planning, organization, and execution to ensure successful outcomes. The Event Management Portal is a comprehensive, web-based platform designed to streamline and enhance the process of managing various types of events, from corporate conferences and trade shows to weddings and social gatherings. This portal integrates a range of features aimed at simplifying event planning, improving communication, and enhancing participant engagement. This is a useful tool for business advertising that raises awareness.Promotion for its clients through advertising and occasionally other means. A robust module that allows users to create detailed event plans, set timelines, and manage schedules. This feature supports drag-and-drop functionality for ease of use and includes automated reminders and notifications. Keywords – Online Event, Interactivity, Event Management, Operational Excellence, Knowledge Sharing.

Hands-On Neuroinformatics Education at the Crossroads of Online and In-Person: Lessons Learned from NeuroHackademy.

NeuroHackademy ( https://neurohackademy.org ) is a two-week event designed to train early-career neuroscience researchers in data science methods and their application to neuroimaging. The event seeks to bridge the big data skills gap by introducing participants to data science methods and skills that are often ignored in traditional curricula. Such skills are needed for the analysis and interpretation of the kinds of large and complex datasets that have become increasingly important to neuroimaging research due to concerted data collection efforts. In 2020, the event rapidly pivoted from an in-person event to an online event that included hundreds of participants from all over the world. This experience and those of the participants substantially changed our valuation of large online-accessible events. In subsequent events held in 2022 and 2023, we have developed a "hybrid" format that includes both online and in-person participants. We discuss the technical and sociotechnical elements of hybrid events and discuss some of the lessons we have learned while organizing them. We emphasize in particular the role that these events can play in creating a global and inclusive community of practice in the intersection of neuroimaging and data science.

ALICE upgrades during the LHC Long Shutdown 2

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) has been conceived and constructed as a heavy-ion experiment at the LHC. During LHC Runs 1 and 2, it has produced a wide range of physics results using all collision systems available at the LHC. In order to best exploit new physics opportunities opening up with the upgraded LHC and new detector technologies, the experiment has undergone a major upgrade during the LHC Long Shutdown 2 (2019–2022). This comprises the move to continuous readout, the complete overhaul of core detectors, as well as a new online event processing farm with a redesigned online-offline software framework. These improvements will allow to record Pb-Pb collisions at rates up to 50 kHz, while ensuring sensitivity for signals without a triggerable signature.

Cyber–physical event reasoning for distributed energy resources

The widespread adoption of internet-connected and remotely controllable solar plants and energy storages renders coordinated cyber–physical attacks against distributed energy resources (DERs) an emerging risk for power systems. Effective incident response can be facilitated by online DER monitoring providing real-time information on event root causes and physical impacts. Such online event identification is challenged by the lack of historical attack observations, and emergence of new attack strategies. The Cyber-Physical Event Reasoning System CyPhERS provides real-time information on both known and unknown attack types in form of informative and interpretable event signatures, without need to be trained on historical attack samples. To date, CyPhERS has only been demonstrated on a laboratory water distribution testbed of limited complexity, considering human evaluation of event signatures. This work methodologically adapts CyPhERS to specificities of DER operation such as weather and consumer-induced volatility, and introduces an automated signature evaluation system. The feasibility of applying CyPhERS for automated DER monitoring is investigated on a dataset recorded from a real photovoltaic-battery system targeted by several cyber and cyber–physical attack types. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodological adaptations and signature evaluation system enable the application of CyPhERS for automated online identification of different attack types targeting DERs, while greatly reducing the false positive rate.

LL-GNN: Low Latency Graph Neural Networks on FPGAs for High Energy Physics

This work presents a novel reconfigurable architecture for Low Latency Graph Neural Network (LL-GNN) designs for particle detectors, delivering unprecedented low latency performance. Incorporating FPGA-based GNNs into particle detectors presents a unique challenge since it requires sub-microsecond latency to deploy the networks for online event selection with a data rate of hundreds of terabytes per second in the Level-1 triggers at the CERN Large Hadron Collider experiments. This article proposes a novel outer-product based matrix multiplication approach, which is enhanced by exploiting the structured adjacency matrix and a column-major data layout. In addition, we propose a custom code transformation for the matrix multiplication operations, which leverages the structured sparsity patterns and binary features of adjacency matrices to reduce latency and improve hardware efficiency. Moreover, a fusion step is introduced to further reduce the end-to-end design latency by eliminating unnecessary boundaries. Furthermore, a GNN-specific algorithm-hardware co-design approach is presented which not only finds a design with a much better latency but also finds a high accuracy design under given latency constraints. To facilitate this, a customizable template for this low latency GNN hardware architecture has been designed and open-sourced, which enables the generation of low-latency FPGA designs with efficient resource utilization using a high-level synthesis tool. Evaluation results show that our FPGA implementation is up to 9.0 times faster and achieves up to 13.1 times higher power efficiency than a GPU implementation. Compared to the previous FPGA implementations, this work achieves 6.51 to 16.7 times lower latency. Moreover, the latency of our FPGA design is sufficiently low to enable deployment of GNNs in a sub-microsecond, real-time collider trigger system, enabling it to benefit from improved accuracy. The proposed LL-GNN design advances the next generation of trigger systems by enabling sophisticated algorithms to process experimental data efficiently.

OBTAINING A SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL FOR ASSESSING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPACT OF AN ONLINE EVENT

Since the information environment influences people’s behavior, it is essential to develop tools that will measure the degree of its influence. The most productive tool would be the method of psychosemantics, which allows to present the area of meanings, adequate to the reflected experience in human consciousness. The analysis of meanings allows us to obtain a toolkit for measuring the effectiveness of an educational event. Semantic analysis of the generalized characteristics by the participants of the online event allowed us to identify a list of semantic universals that can be used to assess the psychological and pedagogical impact.

The MUonE DAQ: online track-finding andevent selection in hardware at 40 MHz

High-intensity particle beams provide a significant challenge to DAQ systems, especially in complex architectures reading out many sensors. The MUonE experiment has been conducting beam tests using the M2 muon beam at CERN, with in-spill intensity of 5 × 107 muons/s, using tracking modules equipped with silicon strip sensors and a module readout bandwidth of 5 Gb/s. A pilot run has been performed in late summer 2023, incorporating several such modules arranged in three tracking stations and a prototype of an electromagnetic calorimeter connected to a triggerless readout system. Limits on processing and data storage will necessitate online event selection to be implemented in hardware, on state-of-the-art AMD-Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs.The status and plans of the MUonE DAQ operation will be presented, outlining a general purpose platform for online event selection, from simple occupancy cuts, to track reconstruction, vertexing, and particle identification.

Study protocol for a cross-sectional online survey investigating patient preferences and experiences of waiting for elective cardiac surgery

IntroductionBeing on a waiting list for elective (planned) cardiac surgery can be physically and psychologically challenging for patients. Research suggests that stress associated with waiting for surgery is dependent on...

Reinventing Fashion as an Affective Apparatus by China's Youth: Bilibili, Danmaku Commentaries, and the Online Hanfu Ceremony During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Hanfu, an attire newly reinvented by China's youth, has been revived as traditional Chinese attire and further reconstructed as a symbol of China's emerging cultural identity. During the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, the annual National Costume Day, launched in 2018 by the Chinese Communist Youth League, transitioned into an online event on Bilibili, an emerging media platform in China. Known as the online Hanfu ceremony, this National Costume Day comprised self-produced short films contributed by Hanfu supporters who created videos during the lockdown. This article employs a case study approach focusing on the online Hanfu ceremony to delve into the impacts of such an event in the wake of a national health crisis. Its results indicate that Hanfu served as an affective apparatus to gather Chinese people online, evoking feelings of nationalism through the notion of cultural confidence. By assembling as a community online via Bilibili, younger Chinese people were able to experience a sense of belonging and affective moments of attachment. Such positive affective sentiments provided solace and cohesion, aiding individuals in navigating the collective ordeal of COVID-19, thereby serving the nation through configuring Hanfu as an affective apparatus—a tool for constituting solidarity.

Online Job Portal using Django

The main purpose of the job portal of the Django project is to manage job information, search, post jobs, register with employers, and find jobs. It manages all information regarding employers, interviews, job searches, and workplaces. The project was created with the administration closed, so it was easier for administrators to control it. The startup aims to create the necessary software to reduce the hassle of negotiations with employers, cover letters, interviews, and career guidance. It tracks all information regarding job postings, job listings, and job searches this article, the author presents an online recruitment system that allows employers to post recruitment advertisements, where job seekers come to apply for Volunteers while looking for a job. The event portal provides access to key events tailored to business needs. Online Event Portal is a website designed specifically for job searches. Administrators can access existing roles. Users need to register themselves and then log in. These jobs will be displayed to customers based on their search terms.

Working over the performance and the limit bring occupational disease!

At the online event, IMM Occupational Health and Safety Branch Manager Dr. Özkan Kaan Karadağ made a presentation titled 'Occupational diseases in Türkiye's second century: Two steps forward and one step back'.

Two unlikely bedfellows: Towards a decolonial unconference methodology

This paper examines a specific unconferencing methodology designed for the HELTASA (un)conference, an international online event held in 2021 in South Africa. Drawing from the principles of unconferencing and decolonisation, the description of the unconferencing methodology in this paper is interspersed with collective autoethnographic reflections, collected through individual and collective writing engagements, to engage with our complex narratives as designers, facilitators and presenters/participants of this (Un)Conference. Through selected vignettes of reflective moments in planning and facilitating this (un)conference, we explore opportunities and challenges when adopting both principles of unconferencing and decolonisation in our practice. We end the paper with a discussion of the possibilities of adopting a decolonial unconferencing model in the global South through a colonial matrix of power.

Early diagnosis of hearing loss is very important!

Üsküdar University Vocational School of Health Services organized an online event titled "World Hearing Day".

The key to a psychological autopsy is the person's mental history...

Üsküdar University Vocational School of Health Services Autopsy Assistant Program organized an event titled 'Psychological Autopsy'. Expert Psychologist and Psychotherapist Ayşe Ümet was the guest of the online event.

Rebalancing Regulation in an Era of Distrust

On Thursday, 21 September 2023, TelSoc hosted an online event to discuss a number of important developments involving the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). The first development was the continuing reduction in the number of complaints by consumers about the services provided by telecommunications operators. The second development is that the TIO has called for a different model – direct regulation – to be adopted for regulation in the sector where it impacts consumers. This call has occurred at a time when the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Code is progressing through the approval stages. Over the past twenty-five years in Australia, the preferred approach to the development of industry codes of practice has been largely by the industry, with subsequent regulatory adoption by the ACMA. Is this model serving Australia well in the current environment?

ANALYSIS OF THE PSYCHO-EMOTIONAL STATE OF UKRAINIANS AND ASPECTS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSISTANCE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CURRENT WAR

Purpose. This study aims to characterize the psychoemotional states of Ukrainians and aspects of providing psychological assistance at the beginning of the current war, the first two months, based on the analysis of scientific sources, statistical data, and the results of empirical research.
 Methods. To achieve this aim, we used the following research methods: generalized and comparative-systemic analysis of scientific sources, systematization and modelling of research results, comprehensive analysis of the experience of psychologists working within volunteer projects, concealed population surveys based on the Raven questionnaire (Raven, 1997), methods of mathematical statistics, statistical analysis of data from the Telegram channel «SvitloPodiya», analysis of private and publicly available posts in online event chats and social networks, the use of standardized questionnaires and narrative writing, as well as the design of a cross-sectional study. We used Statistica 12 software and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-2015) software for statistical analysis.
 Results. The study revealed that factors influencing the deterioration of the psychoemotional state of Ukrainians included job loss or the inability to attend work or school, increased free time due to inactivity, loneliness, insufficient information about behaviour rules during bombardments, alarm signals and shelter, a low culture of seeking help from psychologists, parents' inability to explain the war situation to children. Typical negative characteristics of the population's psychoemotional state at the beginning of the war in Ukraine were latent depression, mass anger, various types of fear, egoism, maximum self-concern, a demonstrative need for attention through hysterics and panic attacks, and more.
 Conclusions. Improvements in the psychoemotional state of the population were facilitated by measures including structured and active work, especially volunteer work, positive messages and video recommendations via social media, positive text messages every morning, guidance on social media for self-regulation and emotional management, the efforts of volunteer Telegram channels and other programs for volunteer psychological support, as well as specially designed psycho-pedagogical sessions for children of different ages. Especially designed are online classes for students, daily supervision by educators and psychologists, the application of a psycho-pedagogical approach in education, the dissemination of psycho-pedagogical recommendations to educators, psychologists, and parents, and hosting accompanying webinars, online and in-person training sessions on identifying and addressing symptoms of anxiety disorders and panic attacks, and stabilising the psychoemotional state of individuals of all ages, among other initiatives. The importance of modernising and promoting the effectiveness of social and psychological services in Ukraine is emphasised. It is recommended that self-regulation skills for regulating psychoemotional states be taught from preschool age and introduced to compulsory classes in both general and higher education institutions.