We would like to thank everyone for coming to the 27th International HPSG Conference!

During the business meeting, there was a great discussion of various aspects of virtual technology and what part it should/will play in the future.

What did you like about the virtual conference?

What did you not like? (People are more likely to talk about what they liked, but it is equally important to know about what they did not like!)

What do you think conferences should look like in the future?

Please feel free to discuss here.

The slides of the introduction are online.

The conference starts this coming Monday, August 17th!

Some reminders:

Make sure you have a working Zoom setup, particularly that you can both hear others and that others can hear you (test it with a friend or colleague if you did not participate in one of our warmup sessions). Here are some tips on the common issues with the audio.

Email Olga Zamaraeva or Stefan Müller (or hpsg.2020 at hu-berlin.de) with any questions.

Please watch all the videos beforehand and prepare your questions! The videos are all available now and will stay up at least for the duration of the conference.

Speakers, please prepare a very brief summary of your talk to present at the start of your Q&A! 2-3 minutes for regular talks, up to 5 minutes for the invited talks.

Have your password handy to access the Zoom link (found in Meeting Places) on time for the start of each session! If you accidentally stored a wrong password, clear it out in your web browser settings (google how to clear out stored passwords in your browser, e.g. Firefox, Chrome…) or open the Meeting Places webpage in a new browser. Make sure you can access Meeting Places 10–15 minutes before the session starts.

When you connect to our session in Zoom, please remember to:

• Display your full name (it is nice to know who is who, especially for the newcomers!)
• Turn your video on (unless you really, really must not to for whatever reason! having your video on makes the experience much better for everyone! And trust us, nobody cares what your surroundings look like 🙂 Also, you can use the special Zoom backgrounds–some will be included already and you can add custom–to completely cover your surroundings if you so choose).
• Stay muted unless you are talking (if you forget to mute, one of the hosts may need to mute you. Sounds like rustling paper etc., can be distracting, and also Zoom will keep switching the video to you if you cough or something, thus taking the spotlight away from the speaker).
• Be careful with the chat. The chat can be very useful but pay attention to whether you are sending your message to everyone or to a particular person.
• Indicate that you would like to ask a question by using the “Raise hand” icon in the Participants panel.
• Have a great conference!

Dear Participants,

The 27th International HPSG conference starts this coming Monday!

If you have never participated in an online conference before or would like a refresher, you are welcome to attend one of our “warm-up” sessions (this is of course not required/expected).

We will just make sure things are working for you, will go over the basic Zoom features etc.

The sessions will take place:

• 15:00 UTC on Thursday, Aug 13
• 4 am UTC on Friday, Aug 14

If you would like to attend one of the sessions, please make sure you have the password handy (which you should have received in response to your registration email) and connect to the Zoom session the link to which you will find in Meeting Places.

If you do not have Zoom installed, please download the Zoom Client for Meeting (it is free) from here.

Please let the organizers know (hpsg.2020@hu-berlin.de) if you have any questions or issues!

Looking forward to seeing you all soon!

Dear participants,

After much consideration, we updated the schedule for the upcoming conference.

We hope that the schedule will allow for diverse participation where everyone will find at least some feasible hours to join the conference, while also having the opportunity to meet people from all over the world (at the cost of getting up early or staying up late).

Note that the updated schedule is different from the preliminary one which you may have seen; we now plan to have a consistent schedule between all three days of the conference. This decision came after much consideration and we sincerely hope the new schedule will overall be better for everyone.

The conference will start at 13:00 UTC on each of the three days. This is somewhat late in Asia and somewhat early on the American west coast, for which we apologize.

In other news, we will have two training sessions on August 13th and 14th, for those who would like to test their connection, make sure they know how to use the technology, etc. More details to follow closer to the event.

Finally, please note that while the schedule displayed on the website is in CEST, it should adjust to your time zone if you download it and open it in your calendar program. One way or another, we recommend adding the schedule to your calendar, in your time zone, to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Looking forward to seeing you soon!

The “early bird” registration deadline for HPSG2020 has now passed, and we are ready to present some exciting statistics! So far, we’ve registered 88 people from various countries and continents. Most of the registrations come from Europe while the Americas and Asia/Oceania each represent about 20% of the crowd. Different kinds of HPSG fans have registered including faculty members, PhD/masters/undergraduate students, and industry representatives. A schedule update will follow soon.

As our conference approaches, we would like to remind those who have chosen the prerecorded video format to prepare their videos and make them available to the audience ahead of time. 

The deadline for sending us a link to your video is August 10th. 

We will be posting the videos on the website as they come. This way, the audience will have an opportunity to watch them at a comfortable pace.

You may choose any platform that is easily accessible to others via a link. Please let us know if you have any questions!

We now found a way to display the times of talks according to the time zone of the person viewing the program. We just enter the program in a normal calendar and use a wordpress plugin to display the calendar. ICS Calendar is a good plugin that can be configured to output a list of events with the associated time.

Another issue is how to start the conference. We decided to put a full invited talk first and schedule the other invited talks, which have prerecorded videos, for the other two days.

This year’s HPSG conference will be the first online HPSG conference ever. Hence we thought we experiment a bit and share our thoughts with you. Let’s make it a great conference!

Stefan & Olga (your “local” organizers)