With little more than two weeks to go, the ASPLOS 2020 General chair and steering committee decided they could not go forward with the planned physical event 16-20 Mars in Lausanne, Switzerland due to the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic. With a record-sized program of 86 papers and 400-500 expected attendance, simply canceling the event was not an option. Instead, ASPLOS went virtual.
This recent blog post on CACM describes what the organizers did to quickly move ASPLOS 2020 online and the changes they had to make in the program. It also provides insight into how well it all went from the attendants’ perspective.