  The emergence of the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic has forced academic
conferences to be held entirely in a virtual manner. While prior studies have
advocated the merits of virtual conferences in terms of energy and cost
savings, organizers are increasingly facing the prospect of planning and
executing them systematically, in order to deliver a rich
conference-attending-experience for all participants. Starting from March 2020,
tens of conferences have been held virtually. Past conferences have revealed
numerous challenges, from budget planning, to selecting the supporting virtual
platforms. Among these, two special challenges were identified: 1) how to
deliver talks to geo-distributed attendees and 2) how to stimulate social
interactions among attendees. These are the two important goals of an academic
conference. In this paper, we advocate a mirror program approach for academic
conferences. More specifically, the conference program is executed in multiple
parallel (mirrored) programs, so that each mirror program can fit a different
time zone. This can effectively address the first challenge.
