About E-Vory

What E-Vory does

When several presentations run in parallel rooms, the people who have to attend them — a jury, a review panel, a set of supervisors, a bench of judges — usually end up scattered across the day. They sit for one presentation at nine, wait two hours, cross the building for another at noon, and come back at four.

E-Vory takes the timetable you already have and proposes a better order for it. The presentations, the rooms and the time slots stay exactly as they are; only which presentation sits in which slot changes. The aim is simple: everyone's sessions should sit close together, so nobody waits around for a session three hours away.

While it re-orders, E-Vory holds to a few rules:

• Nobody is in two rooms at the same moment.
• Nobody is scheduled outside the hours they said they could attend.
• Moving between rooms needs at least one presentation of slack, so nobody has to sprint.
• Idle gaps, room changes and broken time preferences are kept to a minimum.

You get a report showing the proposed programme, what moved, and each person's day before and after, plus the new timetable as a spreadsheet in the shape of the one you loaded — and you decide whether to use it. E-Vory proposes; it never publishes, sends or commits anything on your behalf.

A programme that has no start times yet is no obstacle: give E-Vory the hours the day runs, how long a presentation takes and where the break falls, and it works the times out before it starts re-ordering.

Who it is for

E-Vory was written for university thesis defences, but nothing in it is specific to universities. It works wherever a group of people has to attend a series of presentations spread over parallel rooms:

• Thesis and dissertation defences, vivas, qualifying exams
• Student research days, poster sessions and science fairs
• Competition juries, hackathon and pitch-day judging
• Auditions, recitals and portfolio reviews
• Conference parallel tracks and session chairs
• Interview panels and selection boards

Where it came from

E-Vory started as a small set of Python scripts written for private use. They did the job, but they only ran on the one computer that had Python, the solver and the credentials installed on it. Preparing a programme meant being at that machine.

This is the same tool rebuilt to run in a browser instead, so it no longer depends on any particular computer. It is free, and the source is public. The author uses it too — for real programmes, which is the main reason it keeps improving.

How it works

Re-ordering a programme by hand is guesswork; past a dozen presentations there are more arrangements than anyone can check. E-Vory writes the timetable out as a mathematical optimisation problem — every rule above becomes a constraint or a cost — and hands it to a solver, which searches for the arrangement with the lowest total cost it can find in the time you allow.

• Spreadsheets are read in the page by SheetJS.
• The optimisation is solved by HiGHS, compiled to WebAssembly and run in a background thread so the page stays responsive.
• The search starts from your current programme, so if the time limit cuts it short, the proposal is never worse than what you already have.

All of this happens on your device. There is no server doing the work, no queue, and nothing to sign up for — which is also why your files never leave your computer. See the Privacy page for exactly what is stored and where.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not invent slots or rooms. E-Vory rearranges the timetable you give it; it will not lengthen the day or open another room to make things fit.
• It does not decide for you. The result is a proposal in a report. Nothing is sent to anyone, and no programme is changed anywhere.
• It does not keep accounts. There is no login, no profile and no shared workspace.
• It does not always find the perfect answer. On a large programme the solver may run out of time and return the best arrangement it found. The report says so when that happens.

Free and open source

E-Vory is free to use, with no accounts, no limits and no paid tier. The source code is published under the MIT License at github.com/frianasoa/evory, so you can read it, check the privacy claims on this site for yourself, run it on your own machine, or host your own copy.

Feedback and problems

Bug reports, questions and suggestions are welcome as issues on GitHub. A programme that E-Vory reads badly is the most useful kind of report — though please strip or replace real names before attaching a file, since issues are public.