Fall Meeting 2017 Overview
Program Committee: Lesley Wyborn, Jane Hart and Mark Parsons
ESSI schedule
The good news:
- In May, ESSI received 63 session proposals, up from 45 last year – an increase of 40% (not all of these went ahead)
- This year ESSI received 729 abstracts – up from 614 last year – an increase of ~18.7 %
- ESSI was awarded 35 oral sessions – up from 25 last year – an increase of ~40%
- This year’s oral allocation also includes five eLightnings – which we did not have last year (ESSI had the most eLightnings – other sections did not try this format). Please try and get to at least one of these and provide feedback to me on how you think this new format can be improved as AGU is keen to have more of these next year.
- We also accepted 3 panels this year, where every speaker in the session has ‘invited author’ status.
- We have 10 posters-only sessions.
- Our ESSI highlight sessions: the Leptoukh lecture on Wednesday at 4.00 and our Union on Thursday at 8 do not have anything else scheduled in these time slots (hint, hint!)
- The 4 Data Fair Town halls are on the attached program – note they are at 18:15 on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and at 12:30 on the Wednesday.
- We have a new theme this year which we have called adoption and adaption. This is mainly on Friday, and the sessions have interesting societal applications of informatics, including the ‘water-energy nexus’ and ‘where we live and work’.
- Machine Learning/Deep Learning has certainly hit the 2017 program with a vengeance – it was the biggest increase in any theme on the 2016 program (the other big increases were in FAIR, Repositories & Data Storage and Adoption & Adaption).
The not so good news:
- With so many additional abstracts and sessions this year we could not avoid clashes, and concurrent sessions are the rule for almost every timeslot (sorry if there are any bad clashes for you)
- We divided the program into themes and then tried to have specific themes per day as we did last year. However, try as we may, we could not do that, so this year you just have a dominant theme of the day!
The increased number of abstracts for ESSI was one of the highest across AGU. Overall, the total number of abstracts for AGU decreased from 22,770 in 2016 to 22,236 in 2017 (a decrease of 2.3%).