Breaking barriers in academic communication: Insights from a novel face-to-face interaction tracking app at an international conference

• A novel app was developed to track face-to-face interactions at academic conferences. • Dynamics and patterns of interactions at an international conference were visualized. • International interactions increased over time, particularly during social events. • Interaction patterns revealed barriers by language, fields, and professional roles. • The method provides scalable insights for designing inclusive academic conferences. International conferences play a crucial role in fostering collaborative research, which is essential for advancing scientific progress, especially as global challenges demand increased international collaboration. On-site conferences, in particular, enable face-to-face interactions that foster serendipitous encounters and in-depth information exchange, underscoring the need for thoughtful event designs that maximize such opportunities. However, real-world patterns of conference interactions remain poorly understood due to the difficulty of tracking participant behavior, potentially obscuring communication gaps associated with participants’ attributes. In this study, using a newly developed web application, we obtained a detailed visualization and quantification of the face-to-face interaction dynamics among 2,216 self-selected app users (out of 4,041 total participants) at the 27th International Congress of Entomology (ICE2024 KYOTO), revealing several communication gaps. The application offered a profile exchange function as a supportive, gamified feature for face-to-face networking, generating logs that allowed us to reconstruct a large-scale network of on-site communications. Analysis showed that country pairs sharing a common language and individuals with similar research fields were more likely to interact, while students and non-students interacted less frequently than expected under random mixing. Additionally, timestamp data identified sessions and events with particularly high interaction frequencies, illustrating how conference settings may influence communication. The log data provide a detailed view of the previously unmeasured dynamics and disparities in communication patterns during the conference. Our method, based on participants’ voluntary use of the application, offers a scalable approach to quantifying networking activities and provides valuable insights for designing more effective and inclusive conferences.