Are we prepared to sacrifice everything on the altar of scalability?
At any rate, why can't this scale? Go to the nearest accredited university, sit at a terminal they give you and do you interview.
Universities already have the space to do this, for potentially hundreds of defenders per day.
“Universities already have the space to do this, for potentially hundreds of defenders per day.” Universities have space for their own students while they’re still funded for the time, but conferences aren’t tied to universities. Even so if they were, from the author “The fraction of desk rejected papers at TMLR used to be about 6% in 2023 but is now at about 53%.” universities would have to raise funds for this massive increase of slop review. Us conferences uses unpaid volunteers (most part) from those areas for reviews.
If an independent conference were to hold in-person interviews (and maybe fly people out) for 1000s of submissions, where would they hold it and how would they pay for it?