Page 8 - Winter 2020

From the President
Diane Kewley-Port
Fast-Moving Times
Together, Acoustical Society of America (ASA) members, leaders, and staff are forging ahead to discover new ways to disseminate the
importance of acoustics. Four endeavors over the past months stand out: the Acoustics Virtually Everywhere (AVE, acousticalsociety.org/asa-meetings) meeting; the Committee to Improve Racial Diversity and Inclusivity (CIRDI); a new policy on acoustic hailing devices; and the new
“Reflections” series in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA). Amazingly, when I became ASA president afewmonthsago,onlyoneofthesewasknownbymembers, the replacement of an in-person meeting in Cancun with a virtual meeting. In this column, I describe highlights of the
progress and importance of these four ventures.
Acoustics Virtually Everywhere
Thank you to all the presenters and attendees for joining first online meeting of the ASA AVE through our unique lobby (see Figure 1). AVE has been a living, constantly moving experiment. The meeting was planned with an eye toward future meetings. Although plans are in flux, it is possible that the ASA will have another virtual meeting in 2021.
The most difficult part of planning AVE was that decisions aboutattendancewerebasedonestimatesfromin-person
meetings in single locations. Our goal was to enable practitioners, scientists, and students from around the world to join this meeting. Essentially, problems related to transportation were traded for problems involving time zones. Priority in selecting the time window for technical sessions was given to time zones from Europe through the
American West Coast.
As a result of this planning, virtual technology extends the meeting access across the world for all presentations. Recorded videos of the lectures and narration options for posters enables viewing on-demand before and after the scheduled week of December 7-10, 2020. In fact, presentations are viewable for 30 days after the meeting, thereby solving a common complaint that in-person
ASA members have to choose between two (or more) simultaneous sessions.
AVE was our first effort to take advantage of the many valuable feature of virtual technology. To help us learn from this experience, the ASA will send a survey to seek feedback from participants about the meeting and its schedule. I encourage all meeting participants to comment on aspects of AVE that they liked and provide suggestions on how to improve online meetings.
A significant advantage for AVE is the large number of options for enhancing poster presentations. For
Figure 1. Lobby at the Acoustical Society of America virtual meeting, December 2020.
8 Acoustics Today • Winter 2020