It is well known how important academic seminars are for networking, promoting your research, and keeping up with latest developments. But the scale is under-appreciated: by our estimates more than 1 million academic seminars were happening every year. And then Covid came along...
As a result many seminar series are now online and recorded using solutions that cobble together tools like Zoom, Google Sites and Sheets. This all more or less works but is painful and time consuming to operate. Our co-founders, researchers at Imperial College London and Texas A&M, experienced this firsthand. With their input we set out to build a tool to take the pain out of organising a seminar series. The idea is that in just a few minutes you can set up a professional looking seminar series and begin inviting researchers. We take care of the tedious process of setting up an online presence and working with speakers to find a time slot that works for them, collect their bio, abstract, promotion and more.
We’ve been operating in beta for several months now. You can see some of the seminar series that are up and running on our homepage. These range from your standard departmental series (ABI Tuesday Seminars: https://cassyni.com/series/SeqaVR2QzFGw9XDyyJpSmY), to a series about a specific tool for scientific simulations (PyFR: https://cassyni.com/series/RJ4AcXzinEkeYbdLjAcMAa) through to a journal that brings in authors to talk about influential papers (J. Comp Phys.: https://cassyni.com/series/MU2jWEjQNwTiDTtMjUsZri). Note that you can click on the archive tab of each series to watch recordings of previous seminars.
As you can see, these are not just standard departmental seminars; the shift to online has removed geographics barriers, enabling different types of seminar series to develop. What they all have in common is that they are helping communities to form around different kinds of research topics, and they all give you information and nuance you wouldn’t find by reading the related publications alone.
On the attendee side, we’ve done some nifty work to integrate with Zoom so the live experience is better (instead of a name in a Zoom meeting you can see the profile of people in the room and participate in a live Q&A: https://imgur.com/a/ssGPjbT). In the longer term we think Cassyni can help to make seminars and their recordings a searchable (e.g., check out the slides we’ve automatically extracted from the video and search for “flux” here: https://doi.org/10.52843/cassyni.ibj908) and citable (as you can see from the previous link public seminars on Cassyni get a DOI and are indexed in CrossRef) part of the sphere of human knowledge -- a complement to the published literature.
We thought we’d share what we’ve built with HN in the hope of getting some feedback about what we can improve. If you are a researcher please do take a look and let us know what you think. And if you’re interested in setting up a seminar series drop us a line ([email protected]) to let us know where you came from and we’ll organise an HN discount for you.