Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

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The NeurIPS meeting was first proposed in 1986 as NIPS at the annual invitation-only Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing organized by The California Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories. NIPS was designed as a complementary open interdisciplinary meeting for researchers exploring biological and artificial Neural Networks. Reflecting this multidisciplinary approach, NIPS began in 1987 with information theorist Ed Posner as the conference president and learning theorist Yaser Abu-Mostafa as program chairman.[1] Research presented in the early NIPS 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.

From 1987 until 2000 NIPS 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. In 2018, the abbreviation was changed to NeurIPS.

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 1993, when Posner had a bicycle accident. 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.

Judea Pearl at his poster at the 2013 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

The conference had 5,000 registered participants in 2016, 8,000 in 2017, 10,000 in 2018 and 13,000 in 2019 (with 6,000 on a waiting list), making it the largest conference in Artificial Intelligence. Besides 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[7] in neural networks since 2012, fueled by faster computers and big data, has led to impressive achievement 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). These foundational advances have been accompanied by a resurgence in artificial intelligence.

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]

Past editions:

• 1987–2000: Denver, Colorado, United States
• 2001–2010: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 2011: Granada, Spain, EU
• 2012 & 2013: Stateline, Nevada, United States
• 2014 & 2015: Montréal, Quebec, Canada
• 2016: Barcelona, Spain, EU [14]
• 2017: Long Beach, California, United States[15]
• 2018: Montréal, Quebec, Canada[16]
• 2019: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada[17]

Future editions:

• 2020: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada[17]
• 2021: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

• COSYNE
• ICML
• CIBB
• ICLR

• 2019 Conference
• NeurIPS proceedings
• NIPS 2011 video lectures
• NIPS 2012 video lectures
• Video Journal of Machine Learning Abstracts – Volume 3