Posted: 12/4/2018 Updated: 11/24/2020, 12/18/2019
Update Of 11/24/2020
To my horror, I had to discover today for the first time that an older paper from 2001 now has two official URLs because of this ridiculous name change:
Will this nonsense now be applied retroactively to all older papers?
Update Of 12/18/2019
As someone who has never attended any of the NIPS conferences, I was stunned a few days ago when I read in MIT Technology Review. The Download. Your daily dose of what’s up in emerging technology (12/13/2019) following:
“Only two years ago, so I’m told, one of the hottest AI research conferences of the year [NIPS] was more giant party than academic exchange. In a fight for the best talent, companies handed out endless free swag and threw massive, blowout events, including one featuring Flo Rida, hosted by Intel. The attendees—mostly men in their early 20s and 30s—flushed with huge salaries and the giddiness of being highly coveted, drank free booze and bumped the night away. ... Internally, reports of sexual harrassment, anti-Semitism, racism, and ageism, were also driving conference-goers to question whether they should continue to attend.
So when I arrived in 2018, a diversity and inclusion committee had been appointed, and the long-standing abbreviation NIPS was swapped for another one”
Why did the responsible people in charge not simply prohibit or constrain these free booze parties etc. to start with?
NIPS Not Nipples
NIPS (as it was formerly known; Neural Information Systems Processing) has been for decades one of the global, premier conferences on artificial intelligence & machine learning was recently renamed to NeurIPS. The 32nd, first renamed, annual Conference of 2018 (12/2 through 12/8) is ongoing as I write this blog post.
Here are the official reasons for the name change (emphasis added):
- “The current acronym NIPS has unintended connotations that some members of the community find offensive” (Source 1)
- “In April, over 120 academics from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, signed a letter calling on NIPS to be rebranded following reports of inappropriate behaviour. The letter stated that the "acronym of the conference is prone to unwelcome puns."” (Source 2)
Confusing, the official news release (Source 1) contains a table with polling results (“Do you think we should change the name of the NIPS conference?”), which indicates that a large majority of participants actually disagreed with changing the name (1,218 con answers, 674 pro answers). An astonishing 378 answered they were neutral about the name change (people without a spine?).
I believe, this renaming is highly immature, childish, and infantile. Does not reflect well on the people responsible for it. Mature people would have disciplined the offenders!
Political Correctness And Its Enablers
Some of the gurus of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, e.g. Yann LeCun & Yoshua Bengio (on the Advisory Board of NIPS in 2018), are hard leftists and feminists (blogged about them here & here). My suspicion is that these and other influential, likeminded gentlemen do not have the spine to admonish anyone in person who makes inappropriate remarks. Thus, these gentlemen prefer to rename the show.
Hope Springs Eternal
One can only hope that some more enlightened people at NIPS will reverse the dim witted decision to rename this conference!
Sources:
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