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Association website at least six months after this conference. If you are interested, you

can contact the authors through their e-mails.

We had two plenary sessions with the first on Demography and COVID-19, and the

second on Anticipating the Future Population issues, including the Presidential

address. There were two special Sessions, one was a speech from National Population

and Family Planning Board, Republic of Indonesia on stunting in Indonesia, and

second from IPUMS (Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series) on how to access free

data for population research and analysis. One roundtable discussion was conducted

by IUSSP (International Union for the Scientific Study of Population) Sscientific Panel on

International Migration on strengthening the knowledge base for policy. Please visit

www.asianpa.org for themes, abstracts, authors, and pre-recorded video/ poster

presentations during this conference.

Now, looking at the future, will we have other virtual conferences? As I have been

going through the pandemic, I found that virtual conference may have some

advantages over the traditional, in person conference. With virtual conferences, we

save a lot of money (for ticket, accommodation, living expense, and visa). The

registration fee is also much lower, only US$25, much below over $400 in the previous,

traditional conferences. We also save travelling time a lot. We do not have to take

leave from our jobs. We can just choose some sessions we want to join. For those with

physical limitations, virtual conference allows them to enjoy the conference. The young

scholars, older people and retirees, for example, may have more opportunities to join

the conference.

Sure, there are also many disadvantages of having a virtual conference, such as

inability to have informal gathering outside the conference and even presentation

rooms. But, I believe, advanced technology, including tele- robotic technology,

artificial intelligence technology, and tele-hologram technology will be able to make

the virtual conferences much similar to in-person conferences.

Therefore, a hybrid conference can be the new tradition in the post-pandemic era.

Some people prefer the in-person conference, and other prefer virtual conference.

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