Principles for Planning an Academic Workshop

Workshops are my favourite type of academic meeting. Smaller than conferences, more focused on a particular area of interest, and featuring the latest results. Planning a workshop can be a challenging endeavour. As an organizer, it is hard to foresee what makes for a good experience for the audience. I have co-organized a number of workshops of different shapes and sizes (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and put a lot of thought into what makes for the best audience experience. I will share some of my thoughts and opinions on how to plan an effective and enjoyable workshop.

This post will focus on single-day workshops with a combination of invited talks and contributed papers, which in particular are common at machine learning conferences. However, the same basic principles should still hold for other formats, e.g., week-long workshops.

Principles

Let’s start from the basics. What are the goals of an academic workshop? Why are we even doing this? Here are some reasons, listed in roughly decreasing order of importance.

Facilitating meaningful interactions between participants. While somewhat abstract, this is by far the most important goal of any workshop. Connections between individuals lead to sharing of ideas, new collaborations, and help develop a sense of community. Through a combination of these factors, I find myself most fulfilled and inspired after a workshop with a lot of individual or small group interactions. While the importance of the first two factors may be self-explanatory, I really want to emphasize the last one. Research can be lonely, and it helps to recognize that you’re part of something bigger than yourself, and that someone else actually cares about the same things you do. Some ways to facilitate interactions include breaks, poster sessions, breakout groups, and social events.
Sharing the latest work in the area. Research moves fast. By the time things are published in conferences, the work and ideas may be a year (or more) old. Participants can learn what others are actually working on right now, and those with work-in-progress can get thoughtful feedback from experts in the field. This is typically done via poster presentations and contributed talks.
Highlighting significant lines of research in the field, and next directions. Research areas can be broad, and it is easy to myopically focus on one’s smaller sub-area. It is important to “zoom out” and see what’s been going on elsewhere in the field. This is typically done via invited plenary talks.

Based on these principles, from most to least important, the schedule should feature breaks, poster sessions, contributed talks, and invited talks. However, I’ve noticed workshop organizers often prioritize these in the opposite order.

Concrete Suggestions

Here are some suggestions when planning the schedule for your own workshop.

Have plenty of breaks. Workshops can be tiring, and few have the endurance to maintain their attention for hours at a time. Have plenty of breaks to keep people fresh. This also gives people the opportunity to mingle and discuss the ideas presented so far. If your workshop is part of a bigger conference featuring set coffee breaks, make sure to sync with those breaks.
Schedule for lunch. Everyone needs to go for lunch. If your workshop has lunch provided on-site, an hour should be enough time. If folks have to leave the venue, budget at least 90 minutes. If you leave less time, you risk the poor post-lunch presenter(s) having no audience. And it should go without saying, but do not schedule other things overlapping lunch (except maybe something social, see below).
Poster sessions are the most valuable part of any workshop. At pretty much every event I’ve gone to, the poster session has been the most enriching part of the program. Make sure it is scheduled at a time when the most people will attend. If there are many posters, consider having multiple disjoint sessions. I’ve found that 90 minutes is a sweet spot for the length of a poster session. And if you have control over the logistics, make sure the posters are well spaced and easy to gather around. If poster sessions are too crowded or difficult to navigate, people will do something else instead.
Throw in some social events. While you’ve got everyone in one place, consider scheduling some non-technical components. One favourite of mine is the “junior-senior lunch”: organize so that a “senior” person (i.e., someone with a permanent job) go for lunch with a group of “junior” people (i.e., students and postdocs). This mixes people who might not otherwise interact, and gives the opportunity for senior folks to share some valuable mentorship with the juniors. Another idea is to organize an optional and informal post-workshop outing for food, drinks, etc.: a great chance to casually unwind after a long day.
Encourage intellectual diversity. When curating the program, make sure you represent a variety of different perspectives and topics. For example, when planning the talks for TPDP 2022, we made sure to have a mix of theory and practice, academics and industry, etc. The audience shouldn’t leave the workshop with the impression that only one sub-area is important.
Prompt your invited speakers. Invited speakers are often established researchers, who have broad research agendas, a deep understanding of a sub-area of the field, and meta-perspectives that go beyond a single paper. Thus, it’s a bit disappointing if an invited speaker just chooses to focus narrowly on their most recent paper. Try to guide them to think bigger, potentially speaking about a collection of works, or a research direction that they think is particularly interesting or important. This distinguishes them from any contributed/spotlight talks, which are more focused on a single work.
Accept generously, spotlight judiciously. Space restrictions aside, there is little harm to accepting many papers as posters. As long as the results are relevant to the theme of the workshop, seem sound/correct, have at least something new/interesting, and don’t “do harm” (say, the paper is clearly misleading or poorly framed), I tend towards acceptance. That said, time on the schedule is at a premium (see the final point in this list), so be conservative when choosing which submissions to spotlight with a talk. Try to select things that you believe “everyone must know.” Otherwise, the interested parties can connect during the poster session. Another benefit to fewer spotlight talks is that the talks can be longer: many find it difficult to get something meaningful out of very short lightning talks, and the rapid switching is very tiring.
Dialogue is better than monologue. Many people enjoy and get a lot more out of interactivity. It can get boring and hard to follow if one just sits around all day watching a bunch of talks (invited or contributed). Instead, consider ways to have participants engage on technical topics one-on-one or in small groups. The obvious way to do this is via poster sessions, but be creative! Other options include breakout groups or open problem sessions.
Fewer invited talks. Invited talks take up a lot of time. It is common to schedule these for at least 30 minutes, and having multiple such talks adds up fast. At the same time, workshop organizers are often incentivized into inviting tons of big-name speakers: it may help your workshop get accepted, and attract attendees to your workshop. But this backs you into a corner after you have to design a schedule around them. Consider having only a small number of invited speakers (I think two to three per day is ideal). This features some big picture talks and attracts an audience, while still leaving space for more interactive exchange of ideas. I consider a full day of invited speakers to be a missed opportunity: the vast majority of attendees would end up not saying a single word.
Less is more. More generally, the most common pitfall is succumbing to the urge to cram everything into a single day. Many organizers first commit to all the incredible content they want to host, and only after do they figure out what can actually fit in the schedule. These two steps need to be done simultaneously. Otherwise, the schedule becomes far too packed, and the day becomes a marathon of back-to-back talks with few or no breaks. It’s important to remember that things will also inevitably fall behind schedule, so leave some breathing room to keep things comfortable for the attendees and less stressful for the organizers. I once attended a workshop intended as a “mixer” between two groups, where the organizers stuffed the schedule to be way too full. I left the workshop without the chance to talk to anyone from the other group!

For a concrete example of what I think was a well-scheduled workshop, take a look at TPDP 2022. We had frequent breaks, multiple long poster sessions, and “only” six spotlight talks and two invited talks. This might seem like a sparse program, but it gave lots of room for people to interact, and the talks were all high quality and long enough for people to really get something out of. If I could change anything, I would have tried to coordinate junior-senior groups for the lunch break, and organize a social outing after the workshop. But folks at the time were quite cautious about COVID, so we decided against it.

Acknowledgments. Thanks to Ferdinando Fioretto, Thomas Steinke, and Florian Tramèr for comments and feedback on previous versions of this post.