MICCAI 2021 Daily – Wednesday

18 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Interview understand and align their motivations. We speak different languages, so just coming up with a common language and understanding the different sets of problems people are working on is going to go a long way. There is often a gap between these groups because of a lack of communication, which societies like MICCAI will help us get around. This is our second virtual MICCAI, and although it is still a fantastic event, many of us long for the days when meeting up was so much easier. How do you feel about this? I definitely see the pluses of having virtual meetings. Back in the day when everything was in person and we didn’t have virtual posters and virtual talks, it was harder for people from certain countries to travel. You couldn’t afford it, or it was hard to get a visa, or you had family responsibilities and it was hard to leave your home. There were all sorts of constraints. From that point of view, the virtual format is a good thing. It enables broader participation. But I also think that it’s a much more limited experience. It results in a situation where we don’t get to randomly run into people and have those social networking opportunities. There’s also something about traveling to a location and setting aside five days of your time to focus on the science. You get to understand properly what’s going on, listen to talks, and meet different people. When you’re not doing that, it’s hard to set aside that bandwidth. From that point of view, I think it’s a negative to have everything virtual. Going forward, maybe we can take the positives of both - in-person meetings for people who can make it but supporting virtual talks and posters for people who can’t . We need better technologies for socializing too. Gather.town seems to work well in my experience, but there are others and I’m sure the technology is going to improve very quickly here. Do you have any words for first-time participants at MICCAI about how best to take advantage of everything that is on offer? I vividly remember my first MICCAI. It was in 2007 - not too long ago! What I remember about those early conferences was it felt quite intimidating. I felt a lot of anxiety about being in a roomful of people trying to give a talk or trying to introduce myself to established professors. It took me a while to get over that and build up the confidence to make the most of it. I would strongly encourage people to acknowledge that it’s challenging. When you’re at your first conference, a lot of the stuff is going to be brand new to you. You’re not going to understand everything, you’re inexperienced, you don’t know many people, so you need to take it easy. I guess the advantage of the virtual format is you can be more proactive and absorb much more than you possibly could if you attended in person. But the potential risk when you’re attending from home is that you try to multi-task or there’s other stuff going on around you, so you can’t focus. The more bandwidth you