Dear AAPPS-DPP Members
Thank you for your cooperation on AAPPS-DPP. World situation has been changed dramatically due to COVID-19.
Many countries are now under lock down and tried to restart activities inside the country. COVID wave is not a single wave but
will be multiple times and continue until effective vaccines are developed and successfully suppress COVI-19(virus mutation
makes this not easy).
Today, I have important message about AAPPS-DPP2020.
International conference becomes more on On-line (Say APS April meeting was held successfully as Virtual conference usingZoom(https://aps-april.onlineeventpro.freeman.com/) having 1300 participants in a single session all over the world. Theconference was started from Kavli Foundation Keynote Plenary Session by Nobel Prize winner James Peebles talk.
Zoom conference over 1000 participants works marvelously. IEEE conference IEEE PVSC 47 (https://www.ieeepvsc.org/PVSC47/) is also Virtual now.
We will change AAPPS-DPP2020 from on-site conference to remote e-conference like above Virtual conference. APCTP (Asia
Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics) has been supporting AAPPS-DPP and providing many supports to AAPPS-DPP (such asfinancial support to come to AAPPS-DPP conferences, APPC-13 and 14) and is happy to help DPP to have remote e-conference byproviding ~10 Zoom systems.
In order to join Zoom conference, you need to be familiar to Zoom meeting (all can speak) and Zoom Webinar (only speaker andSession chair (co-host) can speak, others can send question/comments as chat. Session chair will choose a few questions fromchat). Plenary session will be Zoom Webinar for sure. But parallel session <100 participants are most likely Zoom meeting.
At the e-conference, APCTP will open Zoom conference "room" and then session chair (co-host) or some officer will control thesession. While Zoom has security problem, its traffic will be encrypted to be safer in 3 months.
We want to have wide participants all over the world. So basic program structure is quite different from past ones. See attachedtentative e-conference time table schedule written in KR time.Conference period is from Monday (Oct 26) to Saturday (Oct 31),
one day more than originally planned.
[Yellow] 09:00- 13:00 (KR): US participants can join in this time zone:called US time zone
[Green] 13:00- 17:00 (KR): Indian participants can start join in thistime zone: Indian time zone
[Brown] 17:00- 20:30 (KR): European participants can start join in thistime zone: EU time zone
For each time zone, I allocated 2-3 plenary speakers (PL-xx) and 2 hourparallel sessions.
This structure enables participants from all over the world to give plenary, invited and oral talks. In this way, we can strength
cooperation with APS-DPP and EPS-DPP members.
[ First plenary session by Chandra and Innovation need further consideration to take Indian DPP member’s accessibility intoaccount. ]Poster session will be set up on Web separately (Detail is to be decided).
Summary talks are dropped and more plenary including U40 (optional) winners may give talks.
This move is now agreed with IOC chair LOC chair and all PC chairs and informed to PC members and IOC members.
Please consider from now e-conference is our way forward.
Since minimum time required for participation is only one hour or so, I hope you may nominate/invite even Nobel prize winner orKavri Prize winner as well as Maxwell/Alfven Prize winners.
APCTP will provide recording of all plenary talks and possibly all invited and oral talks so that even after the conference,participants can access talks to deepen their understanding.
Actually, I enjoyed APS April meeting by joining two parallel sessions with two screens simultaneously and see how talks areinteresting.
If we use whole slots, we can accommodate >300 invited speakers and 44 plenary speakers.
Please encourage peoples to join and enjoy discussions in e-conference.
World is forced to make another cultural revolution due to COVID-19 and may not just for this year.
Sincerely yours,
M. Kikuchi, AAPPS-DPP chair & CEO
April 29, 2020