Conference on Neural Information Processing
Systems
The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information
Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS)
is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference
held every December. The conference is currently a double-track
meeting (single-track until 2015) that includes invited talks as well
as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by
parallel-track workshops that up to 2013 were held at ski resorts.
History
The NeurIPS meeting was first proposed in 1986 at the annual
invitation-only Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for
Computing organized by The California Institute of Technology
and Bell Laboratories. NeurIPS was designed as a complementary
open interdisciplinary meeting for researchers exploring biological
and artificial Neural Networks. Reflecting this multidisciplinary
approach, NeurIPS began in 1987 with information theorist Ed
Posner as the conference president and learning theorist Yaser AbuMostafa as program chairman.[1] Research presented in the early
NeurIPS meetings included a wide range of topics from efforts to
solve purely engineering problems to the use of computer models
as a tool for understanding biological nervous systems. Since then,
the biological and artificial systems research streams have diverged,
and recent NeurIPS proceedings have been dominated by papers
on machine learning, artificial intelligence and statistics.
Conference on Neural
Information Processing
Systems
Abbreviation NeurIPS (formerly
NIPS)
Discipline
Machine learning,
statistics, artificial
intelligence,
computational
neuroscience
Publication details
History
1987–present
Frequency
Annual
Website
neurips.cc (https://n
eurips.cc)
From 1987 until 2000 NeurIPS was held in Denver, United States. Since then, the conference was held in
Vancouver, Canada (2001–2010), Granada, Spain (2011), and Lake Tahoe, United States (2012–2013). In
2014 and 2015, the conference was held in Montreal, Canada, in Barcelona, Spain in 2016, in Long Beach,
United States in 2017, in Montreal, Canada in 2018 and Vancouver, Canada in 2019. Reflecting its origins
at Snowbird, Utah, the meeting was accompanied by workshops organized at a nearby ski resort up until
2013, when it outgrew ski resorts.
The first NeurIPS Conference was sponsored by the IEEE.[2] The following NeurIPS Conferences have
been organized by the NeurIPS Foundation, established by Ed Posner. Terrence Sejnowski has been the
president of the NeurIPS Foundation since Posner's death in 1993. The board of trustees consists of
previous general chairs of the NeurIPS Conference.
The first proceedings was published in book form by the American Institute of Physics in 1987, and was
entitled Neural Information Processing Systems,[3] then the proceedings from the following conferences
have been published by Morgan Kaufmann (1988–1993), MIT Press (1994–2004) and Curran Associates
(2005–present) under the name Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
The conference was originally abbreviated as "NIPS". By 2018 a few commentators were criticizing the
abbreviation as encouraging sexism due to its association with the word nipples, and as being a slur against
Japanese. The board changed the abbreviation to "NeurIPS" in November 2018.[4]
Topics
Along with machine learning and neuroscience, other fields
represented at NeurIPS include cognitive science, psychology,
computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory. Over
the years, NeurIPS became a premier conference on machine
learning and although the 'Neural' in the NeurIPS acronym had
become something of a historical relic, the resurgence of deep
learning[5] in neural networks since 2012, fueled by faster
computers and big data, has led to achievements in speech
recognition, object recognition in images, image captioning,
language translation and world championship performance in the
game of Go, based on neural architectures inspired by the hierarchy
of areas in the visual cortex (ConvNet) and reinforcement learning
inspired by the basal ganglia (Temporal difference learning).
Judea Pearl at his poster at the 2013
Conference on Neural Information
Processing Systems.
Notable affinity groups have emerged from the NeurIPS conference and displayed diversity, including
Black in AI (in 2017), Queer in AI (in 2016), and others.[6][7]
Named lectures
In addition to invited talks and symposia, NeurIPS also organizes two named lectureships to recognize
distinguished researchers. The NeurIPS Board introduced the Posner Lectureship in honor of NeurIPS
founder Ed Posner; two Posner Lectures were given each year up to 2015.[8] Past lecturers have included:
2010 – Josh Tenenbaum and Michael I. Jordan
2011 – Rich Sutton and Bernhard Schölkopf
2012 – Thomas Dietterich and Terry Sejnowski
2013 – Daphne Koller and Peter Dayan
2014 – Michael Kearns and John Hopfield
2015 – Zoubin Ghahramani and Vladimir Vapnik
2016 – Yann LeCun
2017 – John Platt
2018 – Joëlle Pineau
In 2015, the NeurIPS Board introduced the Breiman Lectureship to highlight work in statistics relevant to
conference topics. The lectureship was named for statistician Leo Breiman, who served on the NeurIPS
Board from 1994 to 2005.[9] Past lecturers have included:
2015 – Robert Tibshirani
2016 – Susan Holmes
2017 – Yee Whye Teh
2018 – David Spiegelhalter
2019 – Bin Yu
2020 – Marloes Maathuis
NIPS experiment
In NIPS 2014, the program chairs duplicated 10% of all submissions and sent them through separate
reviewers to evaluate randomness in the reviewing process.[10] Several researchers interpreted the
result.[11][12] Regarding whether the decision in NIPS is completely random or not, John Langford writes:
"Clearly not—a purely random decision would have arbitrariness of ~78%. It is, however, quite notable that
60% is much closer to 78% than 0%." He concludes that the result of the reviewing process is mostly
arbitrary.[13]
Locations
1987–2000: Denver, Colorado, United States
2001–2010: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2011: Granada, Spain
2012 & 2013: Stateline, Nevada, United States
2014 & 2015: Montréal, Quebec, Canada
2016: Barcelona, Spain[14]
2017: Long Beach, California, United States[15]
2018: Montréal, Quebec, Canada[16]
2019: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada[17]
2020: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada[17] (virtual conference)
2021: Virtual conference
2022 & 2023: New Orleans, Louisiana, United States[18][19]
See also
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE)
International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and
Biostatistics (CIBB)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Notes
1. The first NeurIPS (http://work.caltech.edu/nips)
2. Sponsors of the first NeurIPS (http://work.caltech.edu/nipsimages/sponsors.jpg)
3. The first NeurIPS Proceedings (http://work.caltech.edu/nipsimages/cover.jpg)
4. Else, Holly (19 November 2018). "AI conference widely known as 'NIPS' changes its
controversial acronym" (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07476-w). Nature
News. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-07476-w (https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fd41586-018-07476-w).
Retrieved 17 February 2021.
5. The Deep Learning Revolution (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/deep-learning-revolution).
MIT Press. October 2018. ISBN 9780262038034. Retrieved 30 April 2020.
6. "How one conference embraced diversity" (https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fd41586-018-07718x). Nature. 564 (7735): 161–162. 2018-12-12. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-07718-x (https://doi.o
rg/10.1038%2Fd41586-018-07718-x). PMID 31123357 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/311
23357). S2CID 54481549 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:54481549).
7. "Why you can't just take pictures at the Queer in AI workshop at NeurIPS" (https://venturebea
t.com/2019/12/10/why-you-cant-just-take-pictures-at-the-queer-in-ai-workshop-at-neurips/).
VentureBeat. 2019-12-10. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
8. "24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Vancouver
2010 - VideoLectures - VideoLectures.NET" (http://videolectures.net/nips2010_vancouver/).
videolectures.net. Retrieved 17 July 2017.
9. NIPS 2015 Conference (https://media.nips.cc/Conferences/2015/NIPS-2015-Conference-Bo
ok.pdf) (PDF). Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation. 7 December 2015. p. 10.
Retrieved 17 July 2017.
10. Lawrence, Neil (2014-12-16). "The NIPS Experiment" (https://web.archive.org/web/2015040
3152059/http://inverseprobability.com/2014/12/16/the-nips-experiment/). Inverse Probability.
Archived from the original (http://inverseprobability.com/2014/12/16/the-nips-experiment/) on
2015-04-03. Retrieved 2015-03-31.
11. Fortnow, Lance (2014-12-18). "The NIPS Experiment" (http://blog.computationalcomplexity.o
rg/2014/12/the-nips-experiment.html). Computational Complexity. Retrieved 2015-03-31.
12. Hardt, Moritz (2014-12-15). "The NIPS Experiment" (http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nipsexperiment.html). Moody Rd. Retrieved 2015-03-31.
13. Langford, John (2015-03-09). "The NIPS Experiment" (http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/
181996-the-nips-experiment/fulltext). Communications of the ACM. Retrieved 2015-03-31.
14. Nips.cc - 2016 Conference (https://nips.cc/Conferences/2016)
15. Nips.cc - 2017 Conference (https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017)
16. Nips.cc - 2018 Conference (https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018)
17. "Vancouver Named NeurIPS 2019 & 2020 Host as Visa Issues Continue to Plague the AI
Conference" (https://medium.com/syncedreview/vancouver-named-neurips-2019-2020-hostas-visa-issues-continue-to-plague-the-ai-conference-91665c5e63a2). 5 December 2018.
18. Nips.cc - 2022 Conference (https://nips.cc/Conferences/2022)
19. "NeurIPS | 2023" (https://nips.cc/Conferences/2023).
External links
2019 Conference (https://neurips.cc/)
NeurIPS proceedings (http://books.nips.cc)
NIPS 2011 video lectures (http://videolectures.net/nips2011_granada/)
NIPS 2012 video lectures (http://videolectures.net/nips2012_laketahoe/)
Video Journal of Machine Learning Abstracts – Volume 3 (http://videolectures.net/machine_l
earning_video_abstracts_vol3/)
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