How will you schedule
your conference?
You're planning a conference and you've had your call for papers.
The papers have been submitted, evaluated and selected.
Now you have to create the schedule.
You can either have your co-chairs do it with a "sticky-notes-on-the-wall" solution or...
Leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence...
Introducing...
Let our scheduler, with its AI core, powered by state-of-the-art, advanced mathematics, do the heavy lifting of creating your conference's schedule for you, via a simple 4 step process.
Step 1
You provide us with spreadsheets of:
- Papers, their presenters and expected draws.
- Rooms, their capacities and AV equipment.
- Session dates and times.
- Constraints regarding presenters and/or presentations.
Step 2
Juggler analyzes your data and creates schedules.
Step 3
We provide you with spreadsheets containing the schedules.
Step 4
You modify your constraints as needed to generate improved solutions and we re-analyze and create modified schedules.
Why use an automated scheduler?
There are many software products available to assist with the planning of your conference. There are web portals to facilitate paper submission, tools to facilitate paper evaluation by multiple examiners and tools to facilitate communication between the conference planning team members and the papers' authors.
However, when it comes to actually creating your conference's schedule, the only tools out there are variations of electronic "sticky-notes-on-the-wall".
We searched for a better way. We couldn't find one. So, we built one.
Now, instead of several people in a room for several days hand building a schedule, provide us with the spreadsheets of data you already have and we will create a conflict free schedule that is ready to use.
How valuable is the time of the people building the schedule? What is the opportunity cost of their time? Imagine avoiding all of those costs, all the frustration and all the wasted time of hand building a schedule and having to repeatedly modify it as presenters withdraw as the conference date gets closer and closer.
What kinds of constraints are respected?
Juggler builds schedules that respect the following constraint types. Its framework also allows for the easy introduction of new types.
01
Constraints between Presentations and Room Size
- Every scheduled presentation will be in a room that is large enough to accommodate its expected draw.
02
Constraints between Presenters
- No presenter will ever be scheduled to be in more than one place at one time.
- Different presenters can be constrained to not present at the same time.
03
Constraints between Presenters and Time
- Every presenter's availability will be respected.
04
Theme constraints
- Themed presentations will always be scheduled together in sessions.
05
Constraints between Presentations
- Unopposed presentations, like keynote addresses, will be unopposed.
- Different presentations can be constrained to not be at the same time.
06
Room attribute constraints
- Presentations will be scheduled in rooms that have the required attributes and equipment, for example, accessibility or A/V.
A High-level Description of how Juggler works
Inputs
Juggler uses data from spreadsheets that already exist as a result of your conference planning activities:
- The list of accepted papers along with their presenters, expected draws, whether they are unopposed etc.
- The list of presenters with their e-mail addresses, other demographic data and availability.
- The list of available rooms along with their capacities and A/V equipment.
- The list of dates, times and durations of all sessions.
Process
Juggler builds schedules by analyzing and processing the data:
- Papers are grouped into sessions by theme.
- Papers with similar expected draws are grouped into sessions so that presentations are in rooms of an appropriate size.
- All papers are scheduled in rooms that are large enough to accommodate their expected draw.
- Unopposed presentations, like keynote addresses, are unopposed.
- Presentations constrained to not overlap in time, do not overlap in time.
- Presenter and presentation conflicts are avoided, both self conflicts and conflicts defined by constraints.
- All presenter availability constraints are respected.
- Concurrent conflicts of sessions with the same theme are minimized.
- All room attribute requirement, like accessibility or A/V, are respected.
Outputs
Juggler creates spreadsheets that contain schedules:
- All scheduled papers are shown in their allotted time/date/room slot.
- All unscheduled papers are listed at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
- A log file is provided to explain why unscheduled papers are unscheduled. For example, presenter conflicts, no available rooms of sufficient capacity, etc.
- It is important to remember that not all conferences can be scheduled completely as there are sometimes unresolvable conflicts. For example, shortage of time slots for certain room sizes, unresolvable presenter conflicts, presenter unavailability, etc.
Contact us
PHONE
WEB
ADDRESS
312 Dolomite Drive, Suite 216
Toronto, Ontario M3J 2N2
Canada
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