ICSE 2021 Goes Virtual

November 03, 2020

The current trends in the global Covid-19 pandemic make it very unlikely that we will be able to hold a physical conference in Madrid in May 2021 with sufficient assurances of safety. It is with great sadness that​ we announce that ICSE 2021 and its co-located events and workshops will be held virtually.​ We did not take this decision lightly, but we believe that going fully virtual is the right way forward.

This is obviously not what we had in mind, four years ago, when we put in a tremendous effort to get ICSE to Madrid. We have been working hard since on what would have been the first ICSE to be held in Spain. We aimed to make it an unforgettable event where you could relish Spanish food, music, dance, and other cultural activities. Unfortunately, this will have to wait for better times.

Despite the challenges that everybody is facing these days, we are delighted that ICSE continues to be the prime venue for high-quality research. We have seen numerous submissions that follow the numbers of the previous years and we are excited about a great program to come. We have studied past virtual conferences and we have reached out to you on social media, to understand how we can make the virtual ICSE experience great successful, and interesting for everybody. The most frequent comment that we have received was that virtual conferences are lacking the social interaction that is so important for our community, so we made this our number one goal.

We will be following initiatives of other conferences and integrate many interactive events into the program and leave ample room for effective networking opportunities. On top of that, we have the novel idea to enable decentralized watch parties. Instead of watching ICSE alone at home, we support the organization of local events, in which small groups of people can meet and enjoy the conference together. A watch party can be as big as a lecture hall or as small as your living room, you can eat together, discuss research over coffee, join social events (or create your own!), or just get together to be less alone. We will provide a central platform for finding and registering watch parties, everything else is up to you. This is your chance to be an inspiring host that brings the community together, be it at home, in your research lab, or maybe even as an open invitation for people in your area. More details about the organization will be announced on the ICSE website and the Twitter channel soon!

The whole team is fully committed to making the virtual ICSE an awesome experience for everybody, we hope that you are on board, too.

Sincerely,

Natalia Juristo, General Chair, ICSE 2021.

ICSE, the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, is the premier software engineering conference. Since 1975, ICSE provides a forum where researchers, practitioners, and educators gather together to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and issues in the field of software engineering.