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[John Lazzaro]

	I sent these comments to Mike Mozer in response to his call
for NIPS comments here last week, and he suggested I pass my comments
on to the mailing list.

	As a EE, I tend to look towards IEEE conferences as examples:
there seems to be two major types.

[1] Conferences whose prime goal is to bring together as large a segment of
a research community as possible, while still maintaining a standard of
quality for presentations. IEEE Circuits and Systems and IEEE Acoustics,
Speech, and Signal Processing are two prime examples. Among other 
attributes, its expected that very many if not the majority of the 
attendees will be presenting, and that the conference's primary clientele is
the research community (both academic and industrial), as opposed to the
industrial developer.

[2] Conferences whose prime goal is to showcase the state of the art in
a field, primarily for the benefit of applied development attendees. In 
these conference, a large majority of the attendees will not be presenting
or even doing research, but are either applied developers or non-technical
observers. IEEE Solid State Circuits conference is probably the best 
example of this type of conference: it has a session on the N best new 
microprocessor designs, the N best new DRAM designs,ect. For some types of
chips, academic groups can be competitive with industry groups, and the
session is mixed; in others, a $100 million dollar investment is needed to
design the chip, and so industrial groups dominate.

        Many [1] conferences have explicit rules in submission to ensure as
many different research groups around the world are presenting
as possible: some limit the number of papers a single author can submit,
others use "membership" techniques to try to limit the number of papers from
a lab. On the other hand, [2] conferences are concerned with fairness and with
having the highest quality, but explicitly do not have "broadness" in their
charter: if the N best new Op-Amps all come from a certain company, so be it.

        NIPS has always seemed squarely in the middle of these two types
of conferences, with the "elite" aspirations of the Solid State Circuits
conference, but with a ratio of "researcher" to "developer" attendees that
is closer to the first type of conference. Certain other conferences (most
notably SIGGRAPH) started out where NIPS has been, and ended up as a [2]
type of conference -- even if you discount the majority of the SIGGRAPH
attendees who are there for the trade show and arty stuff, most attendees
of the conference papers are there to listen and learn new research ideas
for possible use in development, not to present papers themselves.      

        The tone of most of the postings on this thread seem to imply that
[1] is the direction that they'd like NIPS to move to. If so, the IEEE
experience has been that more direct approaches than "blind reviewing" can
be used to broaden the conference.

        Personally, I'd prefer [2], because I believe the technologies 
associated with NIPS are going to have the same degree of engineering 
impact as SIGGRAPH (Computer Graphics) and ISSCC (Integrated Circuits) has
had on the world, and part of realizing that impact is having a conference
of type [2]. But for this to occur, NIPS needs to market itself to the
product development community, so that the ratio of developer:researcher
at NIPS increases significantly.