Page 10 - Summer 2021

From the President
Diane Kewley-Port
A Year of Challenges and Achievements
During this extraordinary year, the Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
can be proud of numerous accom- plishments. The Executive Council (EC) and Technical Council have met numerous times to decide totally new
ways to implement the Society’s mission. Executive Direc- tor Susan Fox and her outstanding colleagues in the ASA office succeeded in overcoming enormous challenges. For me, I view steering of both volunteers and staff through rough and unpredictable seas as my achievement. Some of the choices ASA made this year will become more permanent features of our Society, whereas others offered a learning experience that did not sink the ship. In this, my final column in Acoustics Today as the only virtual president of the ASA (hopefully), I provide insights into some notable activities of this past year. In addition, I discuss how new aspects of communicating virtually will continue to benefit ASA in the future.
Fall and Spring Meetings
The most disruptive aspect of ASA’s virtual year was not having in-person meetings. There are long-standing guidelines and traditions for managing our biannual meetings that were of scant use for online meetings. Since starting my presidential term, meetings in Chicago were canceled twice and Cancun, Australia, and Seattle each once, and these were replaced by two virtual meetings. All scientific societies this year have experienced the same chaos. The ASA can be proud that we have offered two scientific meetings online. In order to restructure our meetings, I became a major organizer of the Acous- tics Virtually Everywhere (AVE) meeting in December 2020. Stan Dosso, vice president, stepped up as a major organizer of the Acoustics in Focus (AiF) meeting in June 2021. Insights learned from these two very differ- ent meetings are discussed below.
Fall Meeting
AVE was conceived as a virtual meeting that incorpo- rated all events of an in-person meeting, to the extent possible. There were more than 1,100 abstracts in five
days of scientific sessions, as well as social events, open meetings of technical committees (TCs) and adminis- trative committees. Apparently, this was a good plan because 1,362 people attended.
In the postmeeting survey, 86% rated the program orga- nization good to outstanding and 94% rated the scientific content good to outstanding. Survey instructions strongly encouraged respondents to describe how to improve vir- tual meetings. Negative comments included that the two virtual platforms contracted for AVE were a disaster, both for the ASA staff trying to support the meeting and for presenters at many oral and poster sessions.
Furthermore, a central role that meetings play in the ASA culture is face-to-face contact between attendees in scien- tific sessions. However, survey results included negative remarks about not seeing who was in the sessions or at posters, not being able to verbally ask questions, and missing discussions between attendees. Positive com- ments about the advantages of virtual meetings included full access to recordings before and after the meeting in any time zone and being able to participate without travel and hotel expenses.
Spring Meeting
During the fall meeting, the leadership realized that the extended pandemic made it necessary to transform the spring meeting to virtual as well. However, there was too little time to prepare for another full ASA meeting. Build- ing on the feedback from AVE, the leadership thought that the major issues were finding a new virtual meeting platform that would permit more attendee interaction while downsizing the number of technical sessions and preserving scientific content. The meeting title, Acous- tics in Focus (AiF), and its logo (Figure 1) encapsulated these issues. To implement this smaller meeting, new and innovative session types were developed.
Because I am writing this column several months before the AiF meeting, many readers have already experienced this unique meeting. Briefly, I believe that several of the online, interactive session types will be implemented in
10 Acoustics Today • Summer 2021