elitism at NIPS

[David Willshaw]

1. Even though the practice of removing the authors' names from
submitted papers before sending to referees is not perfect, in my view
it certainly helps to make the refereeing process less biased.

2. I would also support the suggestion that the cohort of referees be
broadened. One way of doing this is to make it more international. In
the list of 174 referees given in this year's programme of Abstracts,
I estimated that 84% (146) were from the USA and Canada. Only 6
referees were from Germany, 4 from France and 3 from the UK, for
example.

David