Confer: A Conference Recommendation and Meetup Tool

One of the primary goals of academic conferences is to promote scientific exchange of advances among people who may otherwise not have the opportunity to hear from one another. We present Confer, a tool designed to help conference attendees find interesting papers and talks, dis-cover and meet people with shared interests, and manage their time using a personalized schedule for the conference. So far, we have deployed Confer to 17 academic confer-ences including several years of CHI and CSCW. Confer is also the primary program tool for CSCW 2016. Log analysis and survey results have shown that the tool helps confer-ence attendees find interesting papers and manage their schedule. Furthermore the recommendation data gener-ated from the tool has been used by conference organizers to help plan conference schedules as well as to organize social gatherings. Finally, the meetup feature seeks to help conference attendees reach out to other attendees with similar interests.