Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

What NeurIPS is

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, known as NeurIPS, is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. It is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and AI research.^[1] Its official description is a multi-track interdisciplinary annual meeting that includes invited talks, demonstrations, symposia, and oral and poster presentations of refereed papers.^[2] Around the main program, the organizers run a professional exposition focusing on machine learning in practice, a series of tutorials, and topical workshops that provide a less formal setting for the exchange of ideas.^[2]

Origins

The meeting was first proposed in 1986, at the annual invitation-only Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing organized by Caltech and Bell Laboratories.^[1] It began in 1987 with the information theorist Ed Posner as conference president and the learning theorist Yaser Abu-Mostafa as program chairman.^[1] The first conference was sponsored by the IEEE. Subsequent conferences have been organized by the NeurIPS Foundation, established by Posner, with Terrence Sejnowski as president since Posner's death in 1993.^[1] The NeurIPS Board later introduced the Posner Lectureship in honor of the founder, and in 2015 added the Breiman Lectureship to highlight statistics work relevant to the conference's topics.^[1]

The proceedings

The first proceedings were published in book form in 1987 by the American Institute of Physics as *Neural Information Processing Systems*. Morgan Kaufmann published them from 1988 to 1993, MIT Press from 1994 to 2004, and Curran Associates from 2005 onward, under the name *Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems*.^[1]

Where it has been held

From 1987 until 2000 the conference was held in Denver. It then moved to Vancouver (2001–2010), Granada (2011), Lake Tahoe (2012–2013), Montreal (2014–2015, and again in 2018), Barcelona (2016) and Long Beach (2017).^[1] Until 2013 the meeting was accompanied by workshops at a nearby ski resort, a habit reflecting its origins at Snowbird, Utah; eventually the conference outgrew ski resorts.^[1]

The name

The conference was originally abbreviated "NIPS".^[1] By 2018 a few commentators were criticizing the abbreviation as encouraging sexism, because of its association with the word nipples, and as being a slur against Japanese people. In November 2018 the board changed the abbreviation to "NeurIPS".^[1]

Community

Notable affinity groups emerged from the conference, among them Queer in AI (2016) and Black in AI (2017).^[1] The official website states that the conference was founded in 1987 and is now a multi-track interdisciplinary annual meeting.^[2] For a meeting that started as a proposal at an invitation-only workshop on neural networks for computing, its present form — refereed papers, tutorials, workshops, demonstrations and an industry exposition — describes how the field around it grew.^[1][2]