elitism at NIPS

[Dave_Touretzky@DST.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU]

The folks involved in running NIPS are aware that in the past, some people
have felt the conference was biased against outsiders.  As the program
chair for NIPS*94, I want to mention some steps we took to reduce that
perception:

* This year we required authors to submit full papers, not just abstracts.
  That made it harder for "famous" people to get by on their reputation
  alone, and easier for "non-famous" people to get good papers in.

* This year we required reviewers to provide real feedback to all authors.
  In order to make this less painful, we completely redesigned the review
  form (it's publicy accessible via the NIPS home page) and, for the first
  time, accepted reviews by email.  Everyone liked getting comments from
  the reviewers, and authors whose papers were not accepted understood why.

* We continue to recruit new people for positions in both the organizing
  and program committees.  It's not the same dozen people year after year.
  We also have a large reviewer pool:  176 people served as reviewers
  this year.

* We tend to bring in "outsiders" as our invited speakers, rather than
  the usual good old boys.  This year's invited speakers included Francis
  Crick of the Salk Insititute, Bill Newsome (a neuroscientist from 
  Stanford), and Malcolm Slaney (a signal processing expert formerly with
  Apple and now at Interval Research.)  None had been to NIPS before.

The fundamental limits on NIPS paper acceptances are that (1) we're
committed to a single-track conference, and (2) we only have room for 138
papers in the proceedings.  Therefore the reviewing process has to be
selective.

The acceptance rate this year was 33%; it was 25% in past years.  The
change is due to fewer submissions, not more acceptances.  Requiring full
papers was probably the cause of the drop in submissions.  The quality of
the accepted papers has remained high.

There are other ways to participate in NIPS besides writing a paper.  We
have a very successful workshop program, where lots of intense interaction
takes place between people with similar interests.  Many people give talks
at the workshops and not at the conference.  (I did that this year.)  NIPS
issues a call for workshop proposals at about the same time as the call for
papers.  Consider organizing a workshop at NIPS*95, or at least
participating in one.  You do not even have to register for the conference;
workshop registration is entirely separate.

The URL for the NIPS home page appears below.  Besides the review form,
you'll also find formatting instructions for paper submissions.  Authors of
accepted NIPS*94 papers will find instructions for how to submit their
final camera-ready copy, which is due January 23.

  http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/afs/cs/project/cnbc/nips/NIPS.html

-- Dave Touretzky
   NIPS*94 Program Chair