This year, for the first time, the conference was jointly organized with COVAL.
The council has actively collaborated with the local organizing committee in Alcalá which was represented in the Council by the former Reser President Luis Rubalcaba (Professor at the University of Alcalá).
The council was involved in the formulation of the call for papers, the suggestion of keynote speakers and thematic sessions, as well as in the support to the organization of practical issues. The academic and industry interaction is considered to be vital for the conference and brings together people from both industry and the public sector within the program. As in precedent years, the RESER Council and the organization of the conference worked together in order to make the conference a special floor to increase the cooperation strategy with other institutions and services networks, and to increase the visibility of RESER.
But this year, due to the pandemic, everything was much more difficult than in any other of the 29 conferences before. As a result of the co-operation with COVAL the conference was origi-nally planned for June. But with the infections growing, we first tried to save it in its in-person fashion by postponing it to September. But the infection situation and the second wave of the pandemic made it inevitable to make it virtual in the second half of January 2021.
It is very remarkable how the team in Alcalá has been able to get around all of these unprece-dented difficulties and to organize a virtual 30th Annual Reser Conference with not less than 9 tracks for researchers, 1 for practitioners, with 50 Parallel sessions and 150 papers.
270 participants came from all over Europe, South America and some African countries.