A boom in AI has created a problem for the organizers of the NeurIPS conference, which is considered an essential machine-learning research conference.
The sheer number of registrations has overwhelmed organizers, who are moving to a lottery system to determine attendees.
“Due to high demand for registrations, NeurIPS will be moving towards a randomized lottery system, effective immediately,” organizers of the NeurIPS conference said in a post on X.
The authors of papers “are still guaranteed registration, but this may change as we release spots to the lottery, so we urge authors to register ASAP,” the organizers wrote in the October 30 post.
(Source: NeurIPS)
AI and ML researchers present the latest research on ML and AI at NeurIPS, which stands for Neural Information Processing Systems.
NeurIPS is the “biggest ML research conference,” said Dylan Patel, who attends the show annually. He runs the semiconductor consultancy SemiAnalysis.
This year’s conference runs from December 10-15 in Vancouver, Canada, at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which has 466,500 square feet of space.
The in-person attendance at NeurIPS in 2023 was 13,307, with 3,075 attending virtually.
The 2023 in-person attendance is about the size of Supercomputing 2023, which had about 14,000 attendees. However, the Colorado Convention Center has 2.2 million square feet of floor space.
In 2022, NeurIPS had 9,835 in-person and 5,555 virtual attendees. The conference was virtual in 2021 and 2020.
The first NeurIPS was held in 2010 in Vancouver with 1,354 attendees.
The last-minute decision by NeurIPS organizers confused attendees who had already registered. Commenters on NeurIPS’s X post wonder what the switch to a lottery system may mean for those who have already booked travel. Attendees coming from other countries also have to organize visas.
Patel, who has already registered, said his spot was secure, and there was no confusion about the status of attendees.
This year’s NeurIPS conference submissions include a paper by Google’s DeepMind team and papers by researchers using OpenAI’s large language model. Many of the papers accepted for NeurIPS have started appearing on Arxiv.
