Face-to-face or face-to-screen: A quantitative comparison of conferences modalities

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a societal shift from in-person to virtual activities, including scientific conferences. As society navigates a "new normal," the question arises as to the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative modalities. We introduce two new comprehensive datasets enabling direct comparison between virtual and in-person conferences: the first, from a series of nine small conferences, encompasses over 12,000 pairs of potential scientific collaborators across five virtual and four in-person meetings on a range of scientific topics; the expressed goal of these conferences is to create novel collaborations. The second dataset, from a series of three large physics conferences, encompasses >250,000 possible pairs of scientific collaborators. Our study provides quantitative insight into benefits and drawbacks of virtual and in-person conferences for team formation, community building, and engagement. We demonstrate the causal role of formal interaction on team formation across both modalities. Our findings show that formal interaction impacted team formation significantly more in virtual settings, while informal interaction played a larger role at in-person conferences as compared with virtual. We show that a nonlinear memory model for predicting team formation based on interaction outperforms seven alternative models. The model suggests that prior knowledge and interaction time contribute to catalyzing collaborations in both settings. Our results underscore the critical responsibility of organizers for optimizing professional interactions, whether virtual or in-person.