View source for Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

{{Short description|Machine-learning and computational-neuroscience conference}}
{{Infobox academic conference
| title = Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
| logo = [[File:Logo for Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.svg|200px]]
| abbreviation = NeurIPS (formerly NIPS)
| discipline = [[Machine learning]], [[statistics]], [[artificial intelligence]], [[computational neuroscience]]
| publisher =
| history = 1987–present
| frequency = Annual
| website = {{url|https://neurips.cc}}
}}
The '''Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems''' (abbreviated as '''NeurIPS''' and formerly '''NIPS''')  is a [[machine learning]] and [[computational neuroscience]] [[Academic conference|conference]] held every December. Along with [[International Conference on Learning Representations|ICLR]] and [[International Conference on Machine Learning|ICML]], it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in [[machine learning]] and [[artificial intelligence]] research.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Artificial Intelligence - Google Scholar Metrics |url=https://scholar.google.es/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=eng_artificialintelligence |access-date=2024-07-10 |website=scholar.google.es}}</ref>

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 ==
{{Machine learning bar}}
The NeurIPS meeting was first proposed in 1986 at the annual invitation-only Snowbird Meeting on [[Artificial neural network|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 [[Neural network|biological]] and artificial [[Artificial neural network|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.<ref>[http://work.caltech.edu/nips The first NeurIPS]</ref> 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]].<ref>[http://work.caltech.edu/nipsimages/sponsors.jpg Sponsors of the first NeurIPS]</ref> 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.<ref>[https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2024/Board]</ref>

The first [[proceedings]] was published in book form by the [[American Institute of Physics]] in 1987, and was entitled ''Neural Information Processing Systems'',<ref>[http://work.caltech.edu/nipsimages/cover.jpg The first NeurIPS Proceedings]</ref> 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 ''[[nipple]]s'', and as being a [[Nip|slur against Japanese]]. The board changed the abbreviation to "NeurIPS" in November 2018.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Else |first1=Holly |title=AI conference widely known as 'NIPS' changes its controversial acronym |url=https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07476-w |access-date=17 February 2021 |work=Nature News |date=19 November 2018 |language=en |doi=10.1038/d41586-018-07476-w}}</ref>

== Topics ==
[[File:Judea Pearl at NIPS 2013 (11781981594).jpg|thumb|[[Judea Pearl]] at his poster at the 2013 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems]]
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]]<ref>{{cite book|title=The Deep Learning Revolution|date=October 2018|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=9780262038034|url= https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/deep-learning-revolution|access-date=30 April 2020}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{Cite journal|date=2018-12-12|title=How one conference embraced diversity|journal=Nature|language=en|volume=564|issue=7735|pages=161–162|doi=10.1038/d41586-018-07718-x|pmid=31123357|s2cid=54481549|doi-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|date=2019-12-10|title=Why you can't just take pictures at the Queer in AI workshop at NeurIPS|url=https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/10/why-you-cant-just-take-pictures-at-the-queer-in-ai-workshop-at-neurips/|access-date=2021-12-22|website=VentureBeat|language=en-US}}</ref>

===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.<ref>{{cite web|title=24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Vancouver 2010 - VideoLectures - VideoLectures.NET|url=http://videolectures.net/nips2010_vancouver/|website=videolectures.net|access-date=17 July 2017}}</ref> Past lecturers have included:

*2010 – [[Josh Tenenbaum]] and [[Michael I. Jordan]]
*2011 – [[Richard S. Sutton|Rich Sutton]] and [[Bernhard Schölkopf]]
*2012 – [[Thomas Dietterich]] and [[Terry Sejnowski]]
*2013 – [[Daphne Koller]] and [[Peter Dayan]]
*2014 – [[Michael Kearns (computer scientist)|Michael Kearns]] and [[John Hopfield]]
*2015 – [[Zoubin Ghahramani]] and [[Vladimir Vapnik]]
*2016 – [[Yann LeCun]]
*2017 – [[John Platt (computer scientist)|John Platt]]
*2018 – [[Joëlle Pineau]]
*2019 – [[Yoshua Bengio]]
*2020 – [[Christopher Bishop]]
*2021 – [[Peter Bartlett (computer scientist)|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.<ref>{{cite book|title=NIPS 2015 Conference|date=7 December 2015|publisher=Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation|page=10|url=https://media.nips.cc/Conferences/2015/NIPS-2015-Conference-Book.pdf|access-date=17 July 2017}}</ref> Past lecturers have included:

*2015 – [[Robert Tibshirani]]
*2016 – [[Susan P. Holmes|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]]

== 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.<ref name="lawrennd 2014">{{cite web| last=Lawrence| first=Neil| title=The NIPS Experiment| website=Inverse Probability| date=2014-12-16| url=http://inverseprobability.com/2014/12/16/the-nips-experiment/| access-date=2015-03-31| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150403152059/http://inverseprobability.com/2014/12/16/the-nips-experiment/| archive-date=2015-04-03| url-status=dead}}</ref> Several researchers interpreted the result.<ref name="Fortnow 2014">{{cite web | last=Fortnow | first=Lance | title=The NIPS Experiment | website=Computational Complexity | date=2014-12-18  | url=http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2014/12/the-nips-experiment.html | access-date=2015-03-31}}</ref><ref name="Moody Rd 2014">{{cite web | last=Hardt| first=Moritz | title=The NIPS Experiment | website=Moody Rd | date=2014-12-15  | url=http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html | access-date=2015-03-31}}</ref> Regarding whether the decision in NIPS is completely random or not, [[John Langford (computer scientist)|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.<ref name="Langford 2015">{{cite web | last=Langford | first=John | title=The NIPS Experiment | website=Communications of the ACM | date=2015-03-09  | url=http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/181996-the-nips-experiment/fulltext | access-date=2015-03-31}}</ref>

== Locations ==
* {{flagicon|United States }} 1987–2000: [[Denver]], [[Colorado]], United States
* {{flagicon|Canada}} 2001–2010: [[Vancouver]], [[British Columbia]], Canada
* {{flagicon|Spain}} 2011: [[Granada]], Spain
* {{flagicon|United States }} 2012 & 2013: [[Stateline, Nevada|Stateline]], [[Nevada]], United States
* {{flagicon|Canada}} 2014 & 2015: [[Montréal]], [[Quebec]], Canada
* {{flagicon|Spain}} 2016: [[Barcelona]], Spain<ref>[https://nips.cc/Conferences/2016 Nips.cc - 2016 Conference]</ref>
* {{flagicon|United States }} 2017: [[Long Beach, California|Long Beach]], [[California]], United States<ref>[https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017 Nips.cc - 2017 Conference]</ref>
* {{flagicon|Canada}} 2018: [[Montréal]], [[Quebec]], Canada<ref>[https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018 Nips.cc - 2018 Conference]</ref>
* {{flagicon|Canada}} 2019: [[Vancouver]], [[British Columbia]], Canada<ref name=autogenerated1>{{Cite web|url=https://medium.com/syncedreview/vancouver-named-neurips-2019-2020-host-as-visa-issues-continue-to-plague-the-ai-conference-91665c5e63a2|title=Vancouver Named NeurIPS 2019 & 2020 Host as Visa Issues Continue to Plague the AI Conference|date=5 December 2018}}</ref>
* {{flagicon|Canada}} 2020: [[Vancouver]], [[British Columbia]], Canada<ref name=autogenerated1 /> (virtual conference)
* 2021: Virtual conference
* {{flagicon|United States }} 2022 & 2023: [[New Orleans]], [[Louisiana]], United States<ref>[https://nips.cc/Conferences/2022 Nips.cc - 2022 Conference]</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=NeurIPS {{!}} 2023 |url=https://nips.cc/Conferences/2023}}</ref>
* {{flagicon|Canada}} 2024: [[Vancouver]], [[British Columbia]], Canada
* {{flagicon|United States}} 2025: [[San Diego]], [[California]], United States

== 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 ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
*[https://neurips.cc/ 2019 Conference]
*[http://books.nips.cc NeurIPS proceedings]
*[http://videolectures.net/nips2011_granada/ NIPS 2011 video lectures]
*[http://videolectures.net/nips2012_laketahoe/ NIPS 2012 video lectures]
*[http://videolectures.net/machine_learning_video_abstracts_vol3/ Video Journal of Machine Learning Abstracts – Volume 3]

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[[Category:Recurring events established in 1987]]
[[Category:1987 establishments in Colorado]]
[[Category:Artificial intelligence conferences]]
[[Category:Neuroscience conferences]]
[[Category:Computational neuroscience]]
[[Category:Signal processing conferences]]
[[Category:International conferences in Canada]]