Welcome to AIOS Proceedings

Activities for the Year 2020
As you all know we had made a conscious effort to go paperless for the entire gamut of activities of editor proceedings and hence most of our efforts have been focused on developing and upgrading the Proceedings Website contents and on biweekly emails carrying scientific contents presented at the AIOC 2020. In view of the COVID related restrictions we have also conducted a couple of well attended webinars.

Proceedings Website
All the scientific sessions of AIOC 2020 which were recorded and handed over to us by the AIOS secretary have been integrated into the AIOS Editor Proceedings website. If you visit the website you will find abstracts of all the submitted sessions. The proof-read text of the best paper of the sessions have also been uploaded. In compliance with the OBSC decision unlike the last 3 years this year there will be no hard copy of the AIOS Best Papers Proceedings book. This decision was taken in view of the financial crunch that the AIOS is going through. The soft copy will be uploaded on the website. All the e posters, physical posters have been converted to web format and embedded there. The site also contains all the presented videos. The bi weekly mailers which go up to 25000 plus AIOS members are also archived in the communication page of the website. We received about 24 TB of data after the 2020 conference and though it was quite humongous amount of data – it was crunched and ultimately, uploaded – 3169 videos on the YouTube channels of the editor proceedings. 3144 videos were also embedded on the website. The volume has actually increased by 18.5 percent from the previous year. The website has become quite popular and everyday it attracts about 446 visitors – a 27 percent increase from 2019. Total unique visitors recorded over the last year has been 13475. The user base has increased significantly. 90 percent of visits are from India and user-wise top 10 states. As I have mentioned earlier we have a couple of YouTube channels and there are 8111 followers on the primary channel which is double compared to the previous year. There have been 9,83,835 views on the primary channel and 10458 videos have been uploaded. A renewed request is made to the AIOS president to involve the Editor Proceedings in the discussions while finalizing the AV vendor. This will go a long way in preventing the recurring recording mistakes that have been happening at the AV end. The AV team also has to be instructed to meticulously follow the recording guidelines prepared by me and repeatedly submitted by me to the AIOS secretariat. Poor quality recording cannot be enhanced for a better viewer experience.

Mass emails:
We have also embarked on the mass email campaign for the last couple of years and this year so far, we have sent out about 145 mass emails to more than 23000 ophthalmologists across the country. This activity too has been found to be very useful and popular by all sections of ophthalmologists in the country.

Members of AIOS particularly the younger ophthalmologists do write to me or call me expressing their happiness over this mode of knowledge distribution. Over 7, 25,741 email reads have been noted.

Webinar:
We have also conducted two very popular and well attended webinars 1) Master Class on IOL calculation – Part 1, and 2) Phaco Complications – Basic & Advanced Part 1. There was a strong international faculty presence in both the webinars adding quality to the webinars which have been archived in the Editor Proceedings YouTube channels and will serve as important resource materials for the ophthalmologists. We are going to follow up on high quality webinar activities this year too.

Activities for the Virtual AIOC 2021
The annual AIOC 2021 is a virtual conference this year and the Team scientific committee has done a very good job – it promises to be a virtual academic feast. As the Chairman Scientific Committee had mentioned in his presentation about 500 programs are going to be running in all the virtual halls. These programs are actually not planned to stream live in any other channel in accordance with the OBSC decision. It is felt that this strategy of deferring the life streaming of the meeting deliberations will result in a higher number of registrations. However, our team has been receiving links for all the scientific presentations on a daily basis from the AV team engaged by the AIOS secretariat. Team Editor Proceedings have started downloading the contents. The downloaded contents will be processed and rendered suitable for utilization in the future. We have done away with the earlier practice of receiving copies of the downloaded contents in multiple hard disc drives. Since a huge quantum of data is involved It would have required 60 to 80 hard disk drives with an implication of cost escalation, additional processing time with the unfortunate chance of data loss due to HDD crash. We have planned to fast track the activities. The AIOS office has verbally extended full co-operation in this venture and as soon as possible it will be uploaded in the Editor Proceedings website. The biweekly e mails will continue in the meantime.

I would like to thank the outgoing President Dr. Mahipal Singh Sachdev for his wonderful tenure and complete support in my endeavors. He has been responsible for raising the bar for all facets of AIOS activities. I would like to welcome our incoming President Dr. Barun Nayak and wish him all the best in his effort to further improve the performance of All India Ophthalmic Society. My thanks are also due to the headquarters, Secretary, Treasurer and support staff of AIOS headquarter, the AV team, and last but not the least the people from Numerotec who have done exceptionally good work in getting us to work at a very efficient level.

I will be getting in touch with you at frequent intervals for updates.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me for any queries. Let us all work together to take AIOS to greater heights.

Best Wishes

Yours Sincerely
Dr. Arup Chakrabarti
editorproceedings@aios.org