论文标题

在公平的虚拟会议计划中:实现公平的参与者和演讲者满意度

On Fair Virtual Conference Scheduling: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction

论文作者

Patro, Gourab K, Chakraborty, Abhijnan, Ganguly, Niloy, Gummadi, Krishna P.

论文摘要

(COVID-19)大流行引起的对旅行和社交聚会的限制促使大多数会议组织者在网上移动活动。但是,与体育会议相反,虚拟会议在有效安排谈判方面面临着挑战,这考虑了来自不同时间区的参与者的可用性以及他们在参加不同谈判中的兴趣。在这种情况下,会议组织者的自然目标是最大化某些全球福利措施,例如在所有演讲中的预期受众参与。但是,我们表明,对全球福利的优化可能会导致对利益相关者不公平的时间表,即,参与者和演讲者的个别公用事业可能是非常不平等的。为了解决公平的关注,我们正式为参与者和演讲者定义了公平概念,随后为他们提供了适当的公平目标。我们表明,福利和公平目标可能彼此冲突,并且在同时关心它们的同时,需要在这些目标之间保持平衡。因此,我们提出了一个联合优化框架,该框架允许会议组织者可以在全球福利,参与者公平与说话者的公平目标之间设计平衡(即允许权衡取舍)的谈话时间表(即允许权衡取舍)。我们表明,可以使用整数线性编程来解决优化问题,并在虚拟会议计划中经验评估这种联合优化方法的必要性和好处。

The (COVID-19) pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gatherings have prompted most conference organizers to move their events online. However, in contrast to physical conferences, virtual conferences face a challenge in efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different time-zones as well as their interests in attending different talks. In such settings, a natural objective for the conference organizers would be to maximize some global welfare measure, such as the total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for global welfare could result in a schedule that is unfair to the stakeholders, i.e., the individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address the fairness concerns, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and subsequently derive suitable fairness objectives for them. We show that the welfare and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, and there is a need to maintain a balance between these objective while caring for them simultaneously. Thus, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design talk schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) between global welfare, participant fairness and the speaker fairness objectives. We show that the optimization problem can be solved using integer linear programming, and empirically evaluate the necessity and benefits of such joint optimization approach in virtual conference scheduling.

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