Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

The conference includes three days of invited talks along with oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by two days of workshops and competitions.

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 Abu-Mostafa as program chairman. 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.

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. 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, 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.

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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 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).

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.

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. 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
2019 – Yoshua Bengio
2020 – Christopher Bishop
2021 – Peter Bartlett

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. Past lecturers have included:

2015 – Robert Tibshirani
2016 – Susan Holmes
2017 – Yee Whye Teh
2018 – David Spiegelhalter
2019 – Bin Yu
2020 – Marloes Maathuis
2021 – Gabor Lugosi
2022 – Emmanuel Candes
2023 – Susan Murphy
2024 – Arnaud Doucet

NeurIPS consistency 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. Several researchers interpreted the result. 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. In NeurIPS 2021, the program chairs repeated the 2014 experiment and found similar levels of review inconsistency; 23% of duplicated submissions received different accept/reject decisions, and 50.6% of accepted papers would have been rejected under re-review.

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
2017: Long Beach, California, United States
2018: Montréal, Quebec, Canada
2019: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2020: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (virtual conference)
2021: Virtual conference
2022 & 2023: New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
2024: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2025: San Diego, California, United States and Mexico City, Mexico
2026: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, with satellite events in Atlanta and Paris