Going Remote: Challenges and Opportunities to Remote Learning, Work, and Collaboration

International audienceEven prior to the pandemic, there was increasing focus on enabling remote work and education. Although many companies have geographically distributed teams and students have moved to online instruction, remote working and learning has yet to become the norm despite the available technology and resources. There are many pros to remote meeting and education including increased flexibility, positive environmental benefits and improved work-life integration, but there are still tangible challenges when it comes to normalizing virtual interaction.Key challenges include effective communication, preventing isolation, and maintaining social connectivity. Being at the forefront of innovation, our community often leads technology adoption. Since the pandemic has been the catalyst for pushing new technologies forward, this provided an opportunity to explore how to shape the inevitable shift to more distributed and remote styles of working and learning.At the virtual 2021 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), we had the opportunity to have an event focused on remote learning, working, conferencing, and the future technologies that will improve all three. We had multiple distinguished speakers come talk about each of these topics using the Gather Town platform for presentations and the panel discussion. Ironically, during a discussion about going remote, the Gather Town platform experienced technical difficulties leading to no chance for a full panel discussion. We have re-invited the speakers to provide their perspectives on a few of the topics touched upon in their presentations