Neuromatch Conference in a Box

Neuromatch Conference (NMC) held multiple virtual conferences during the COVID pandemic. Each of our conferences has led the way in providing new innovations to the virtual conference space. Many scientific conferences adopted our pipeline and framework to their own conferences. However, to date, most organizers have to develop their own tech stack for organizing the virtual conference. Here, we provide our framework for organizing Neuromatch Conference, Neuromatch Conference in a Box (NMC Box). We hope that other organizers, not limited to neuroscientists, can adapt our code to create their own virtual conferences in the future.

Components

NMC Box provides following functionalities:

Registration and log-in with Firebase
Search for institution from GRID database

Submission - submit abstracts to Airtable
- Options to ask presenter available times, talk format, theme
- Organizers is responsible to generate track, url, starttime, endtime on Airtable
Search and recommendation engine with infinite scroll design

Mind matching script, run separately to produce output matches between registered attendees
Render for markdown and YAML files
Multiple edition of conferences. The user can still see abstracts from previous conference editions

Workflow

Project Structure

Scripts: Python scripts to generate embeddings and index submissions to ElasticSearch
Frontend: implemented using ReactJS
Backend: implemented using Python FastAPI

Set up environment

There are multiple steps for setting up the environment. We roughly write down as follows:

Set up Firebase authentication, Cloud Firestore, and Airtable (see instructions below)
Install backend dependencies in backend/requirements.txt
Create Airtable base for submission, specify base_id in scripts/es_config.yml and Airtable key in .env file.
Add frontend environment by going to Project settings on Firebase. Then go to General > Add app > add Web App. Copy keys to .env matches to provided .env.example file.
Download Firebase authentication JSON file in the root of this repository. To download, you can go to Project settings on Firebase. Choose Service accounts > Firebase Admin SDK > Generate new private key in Python.
Edit basic information in sitedata/config.yml for the page and scripts/es_config.yml for data to be indexed

Set up backend

We have to create embeddings and index talks to elastic search before running the web application.

First, put data in sitedata/agenda/*.csv
Change information in scripts/es_config.yml where you can put path to CSV files or Airtable ID
Create embedding with embeddings.py script, you may use --option=lsa when you are testing as it is faster and use --option=sent_embed in production as it provides better performance

# run faster
python embeddings.py --option=lsa
# better performance
python embeddings.py --option=sent_embed

Then, serve and index ElasticSearch

bash es_serve.sh # serve Elasticsearch server
python es_index.py # index

Go to backend and serve APIs using

uvicorn api:app --reload  # run on port 8000

To serve backend with FastAPI library.

Set up frontend

Install Node (see NodeSource) and Gatsby (see here). Then run the following scripts in frontend folder:

npm install
gatsby develop && gatsby serve --port 4000

Set up authentication, database, and Airtable

We use Firebase for authentication and Cloud Firestore for storing user data and their preferences (votes). You can set up authentication and Cloud Firestore on Firebase. We use Airtable to recieive our submission (submission, follow by review process, filter, show in recommendation). Below, we list down a some steps to create authentication for the registration.

Google authentication

On Firebase: Set up Google sign in

Github authentication

On Firebase: Set up Github Sign-in method
On Github: Go to settings > Developer settings > Github App > Get Client ID and Client Secret
On Firebase: Put Client ID and Client Secret from Github

Set up Cloud Firestore

As mentioned, we use Cloud Firestore to collect user data and preferences. To create a database/collection, you can go to Firestore Database on Firebase then + Start collection. We create users, preferences as a collection name as specified in sitedata/config.yml.

Airtable

We use Airtable to store NMC submissions. Here, you only have to make sure that form on the website is the same with Airtable (see fields in sitedata/agenda/README.md). Airtable allows organizers to quicky go through submissions and update information easily.

Set up automatic email with SendGrid

We use SendGrid to send email out to our participants. You can create a SendGrid account on SendGrid. Then, set up email domain in Settings > Sender Authentication and API Keys. Then add SENDGRID_API_KEY to .env. We suggest to test the API using sendgrid-python before launching the website. You can specify email content in sitedata/email-content.json.

If SENDGRID_API_KEY is not specified, we will not send an email after registration and submission.

Citations

If you use or refer to NMC workflow, please cite our published articles on TICS and eLife below:

@article{achakulvisut2021towards,
  title={Towards Democratizing and Automating Online Conferences: Lessons from the Neuromatch Conferences},
  author={Achakulvisut, Titipat and Ruangrong, Tulakan and Mineault, Patrick and Vogels, Tim P and Peters, Megan AK and Poirazi, Panayiota and Rozell, Christopher and Wyble, Brad and Goodman, Dan FM and Kording, Konrad Paul},
  journal={Trends in Cognitive Sciences},
  year={2021},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

@article{achakulvisut2020point,
  title={Point of view: Improving on legacy conferences by moving online},
  author={Achakulvisut, Titipat and Ruangrong, Tulakan and Bilgin, Isil and Van Den Bossche, Sofie and Wyble, Brad and Goodman, Dan FM and Kording, Konrad P},
  journal={Elife},
  volume={9},
  pages={e57892},
  year={2020},
  publisher={eLife Sciences Publications Limited}
}

neuromatch/nmc-box