elitism at NIPS

[Dr. D.Y. Yeung]

> 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.

Another step that the organizers of NIPS may consider is to have a
"blind" review process, which is an even more positive step to reduce
that perception.  This practice has been used in some other good
conferences too.

Regards,

Dit-Yan Yeung