[As with previous posts regarding ICM satellite events, I am authoring this post as an individual, and not in my capacity as chair of the ICM Structure Committee, which does not have any advisory or supervisory role over ICM satellite events – T.]

One of the traditional features of the International Congress of Mathematicians are the “short communications”, organized by the local organizing committee (as opposed to the International Mathematical Union), which allows participants at the congress to present either a poster or a short talk (typically 15 minutes or so) during the congress. For instance, here are the titles of the short communications and posters from the 2018 ICM, and here are the short communications and posters from the 2014 ICM. While not as high profile as other events of the ICM such as the plenary lectures, sectional lectures, or prize lectures, the short communications and posters can offer a chance for academics from a quite diverse range of institutions worldwide (and even a few independent mathematicians) be able to present their work to a mathematical audience.

There has been some volunteer effort to try to replicate some form of this event for the upcoming virtual ICM this July as a semi-official “satellite” event of the virtual ICM; it would technically not be part of the core ICM program, but I expect it would be recognized by the IMU as an independently organized satellite. Due to lack of time, funding, and technical expertise, we will not be able to offer any video, audio, or physical hosting for such an event, but we believe that a modest virtual event is possible involving submission of either a PDF “poster” or a PDF “slide deck”, together with other metadata such as author, title, abstract, and external links (e.g., to an externally hosted video presentation of the poster or slides), with some reviewing to ensure a certain minimum level of quality of approved submissions (we are thinking about setting guidelines similar to those required for a submission to the arXiv), and some ability to offer feedback on each submission. (For instance, we are thinking of hosting the event on a MediaWiki, with each communication being given a separate page which can attract discussion and responses to queries from the author(s).) We are also thinking of grouping the poster or slides according to the 20 sections of the 2022 ICM. We would then promote these communications during the virtual ICM, for instance on this blog or on the unofficial ICM Discord. Perhaps some of the other proposed online experiments for virtual events discussed in this previous post could also be implemented experimentally on this satellite event to demonstrate proof-of-concept. (If the event turns out to be successful, one could hope that it could serve as a pilot project for a longer-term and better funded platform for virtual short communications to accompany other conferences, but for now we would like to focus just on the virtual ICM satellite event.)

As one of our first actions, we would like to survey the level of interest in such an event, both among potential submitters of posters or slides, and also potential volunteers to help organize the event (in particular we may need some assistance in manually reviewing submissions, though we do plan to enlist peer reviewers by requiring submitters to rate and comment on other submissions in the same section). We have therefore created a form to (very unscientifically) gauge this level in order to decide on the scale of this project (or whether to attempt it at all). All readers of this blog are welcome to offer feedback through that form, or as a comment to this blog.

EDIT (Mar 29): a formal announcement will be made soon, but you can view a draft of the announcement here.