DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION OF A VIRTUAL CONFERENCE Paula Miranda School of Technology of Setubal, Campus do Instituto Politecnico de Setubal Estefanilha, 2910-761 Setubal, Portugal Nian-Shing Chen Department of Information Management National Sun Yat-sen University,Taiwan No. 70, Lien Hai Rd, Kaohsiung, Taiwan,804 Pedro Isaías Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), Rua Fernao Lopes, 9, 1-Esq. 1050-101 Lisbon, Portugal ABSTRACT This paper has the goals of presenting the system architecture behind an innovative virtual conference, an on-line conference, which took place in April 2005. The conference, innovative in several aspects, has been evaluated through a questionnaire survey performed in the end. The virtual conference is called Multi2005 and was held by the International Association for the Development of the Information Society (IADIS) for a period of three weeks and the conference venue was supported by an LMS (Learning Management System) with both asynchronous and synchronous functionalities support and the server is running at the National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. All keynote speakers and paper presenters were coming from different countries and giving their presentations online, synchronous and live; and the same as for the audience they participated from their own places in their own countries. According to the real practice and questionnaire survey, the virtual conference has demonstrated many potential and benefits even though there are still some obstacles faced for running this kind of 100% virtual conference on the Internet. KEYWORDS Virtual conferences, on-line conferences, conference systems, e-Learning 1. INTRODUCTION This paper addresses the first ever virtual conference performed that mimics the way a traditional conference works: the IADIS Virtual Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2005 (http://www.iadis.org/multi2005). In this paper, the system architecture of the conference is presented and thorough evaluation has been made – the main results are presented. Recent rapid improvements in technology and the increasing bandwidth of Internet access in most parts of the world have led to an increasing popularity for synchronous solutions for instruction and interaction. But online synchronous interaction and possibility of non-verbal information transfer has led to a change in paradigm of how e-learning is being envisaged in its traditional sense. On one hand, it enables teachers to fall back to their traditional habits of face-to-face instructions and on the other hand, it can provide the best of both worlds by blending physical classroom with cyber classroom. Various new challenges are emerging from the use of synchronous techniques along with some very exciting opportunities of improving the quality IADIS International Conference e-Society 2005 59