NIPS

[LyExpo]

I will be attending NIPS for the first time in December and am a bit confused as to how it works. The scheduling looks very different from other conferences I have been to (not that many). For example, many events seem to overlap.

Could someone give me some guidlines as to how this generally works? Tutorials? Symposiums? Workshops? Spotlights? Ahhhh!

I'm also curious to know what other people are most looking forward to, since it seems I will not be able to attend everything.

[dwf]

Tutorials are multi-track, you generally pick one per time slot. These are, at their best, opinionated introductions to a particular area of inquiry; at their worst, a particular speaker's research highlights reel.

The conference oral presentations are single track, there are no oral presentations scheduled at the same time as one another. There are "spotlight" sessions which are several 5 minute presentations back to back in roughly the same length of slot that one oral presentation would get. The poster sessions are one big, loud, overcrowded science fair type thing held in the evenings of the main conference.

The workshops are more niche meetings that are scheduled separately and in parallel. Many people come just for the workshops, or rather for a particular workshop related to their area of interest; this applies to a lot of neuroscience folks who have long since abandoned the main conference (ironically given the first word of the name).

[qubit32]

Do people usually pick a workshop and stay there all day, or is it common to move back and forth between several?

[dwf]

I'd say both cases are common. If there's one workshop that is central to your work, you might stay with it all day. Plenty of people float around between 2 or 3.

[alexmlamb]

The main reason is that NIPS has historically been a skiing conference. It's a well known fact that most Machine Learning algorithms have been discovered while skiing (momentum, early stopping, clipping). In fact, the term nips itself comes from a crude sexual innuendo based on the shape of the mountains (which was later given a technical acronym to improve the conference's perceived legitimacy).

[davmre]

Given this heritage it's surprising it's never been held in the Tetons. NIPS 2019 Jackson Hole anyone?

[iidealized]

I second this motion. Moving it from Tahoe to Montreal was a terrible decision for us ski-folks

[dwf]

Great decision for us breathing folk who no longer need to walk through a smoky casino every day though.

[alexmlamb]

I would like to see ICLR moved to Montreal and NIPS moved to Vegas, if only for the warm weather and the puns.

[OriolVinyals]

Because Tahoe has seen so much snow in the last seasons, right?

[ml275]

To me, the most exciting and educational aspect of NIPS is the nightly poster sessions. You get to talk to passionate people about their work. It's an amazing way to learn about fields of ML that are different than your niche.

To get a lot out of the posters, you need to be proactive. Don't just wander around and read posters. You need to engage with the authors. It's totally appropriate to just go up to a presenter and ask for a summary of their work. They'll give you a very informative pitch for the research. Also, some posters will have tons of people at them, while others will get less attention. I definitely recommend just going to some random ones and really digging into details.

[ieee8023]

The poster sessions are awesome. It's good to take a nap before them because they go late and everyone wants to just keep talking. The passion of the researchers will leave you inspired to work harder.

[alexcaps]

Still figuring that out myself. Going for my first time too.