Sessions
Browse, filter, and inspect every session in your conference and the papers assigned to each, and use the suggester to auto-generate sessions from your accepted papers. Explains how sessions relate to tracks.
Sessions vs. Tracks
These are two different things, and it helps to keep them straight:
- A Session answers when and where — it's a scheduled block: a set of talks in one room at one time (e.g. "NLP — Oral 1", Room A, Tue 10:00). The schedule lives entirely on sessions.
- A Track answers what topic — it's a thematic grouping of papers (a research area) that a paper is assigned to at submission time. A track is not a slot on the calendar.
One track becomes many sessions: the "NLP" track might run as "NLP — Oral 1", "NLP — Oral 2", and "NLP — Posters" across the program. So you use Sessions to build the schedule, and Tracks to organize papers by topic — the track then guides how sessions are grouped (and, later, where they're placed).
If your conference "schedules by track" in the sense of parallel room streams, that's the room columns in the Session Plan grid — not the topical track. In Airballoon, tracks group papers; sessions (with a date, time, and room) are the schedule.
Purpose
The Sessions sub-tab is a searchable, sortable browser of every session in your conference. Each row shows the session name, type, track, paper count, and schedule (date · time · room); expanding a row reveals the papers assigned to it, including invited submissions. A Suggest tool auto-generates sessions from your accepted papers.
When you use it
Use this sub-tab to audit your program — to confirm papers landed in the right sessions, find unscheduled or empty sessions, and check session types and tracks. Use Suggest when you want the system to draft sessions from accepted papers instead of building each one by hand.
Walkthrough
- 1
Open the Conference Leadership Console, select your conference, open the Presentation System tab, and click the Sessions sub-tab.
- 2
Use the type and track dropdowns and the search box to narrow the list. Click Clear to reset all filters.
- 3
Click any column header (Name, Type, Track, Papers, Date) to sort; click again to reverse the order.
- 4
Click a row to expand it and see the assigned papers — paper number, title, an "invited" badge for invited submissions, and presentation format.
- 5
Page through results with the pager at the bottom and change the rows per page (10 / 25 / 50 / 100).
- 6
Review the Track coverage strip above the table — one chip per track showing how many sessions it has, how many accepted papers are assigned, and how many are still unassigned (highlighted). Click a chip to filter the table to that track.
- 7
Click Suggest to open the suggester drawer, which proposes sessions grouped from your accepted papers — grouping orals by track is on by default when the program has tracks, and each session is named
"{Track} — {Format} {n}". Adjust the options, then commit the proposals you want to create them. - 8
Click + New session to build one by hand: pick the program and track, name it, choose the type and mode, then select which unassigned papers (filtered to the chosen track) to place in it.
- 9
To delete a session, expand its row and click Remove session — its papers return to the unassigned pool (they are not deleted).
Most organizers use Suggest to draft sessions from accepted papers in one pass, then tidy up with + New session for anything hand-built. Both stamp the session's track the same way, so track colors and coverage stay consistent however a session was made.
Tips
- Sort by Papers to spot empty sessions, or by Date to find sessions still showing "unscheduled".
- Panels often have no papers — they carry panelist names instead, so an empty panel is usually fine.
- After running Suggest, the table refreshes automatically so you can immediately review and inspect the new sessions.