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General Intelligence
The World’s Biggest A.I. Conference Is Going Virtual, and Finally Becoming More Inclusive
NeurIPS is lowering registration fees and dropping its attendance cap
Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero’s weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters.
The Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference was once a sleepy gathering for well-to-do academics, often held in ski towns to accommodate leisure time before lectures. Over the last eight years, that’s changed. A dramatic rise in the popularity of artificial intelligence has suddenly made NeurIPS one of the hottest conference tickets in the world.
But 2020 is the conference’s most drastic shift yet. Organizers announced this week that NeurIPS, now the world’s best-known A.I. conference, would be completely virtual this year, and with considerably cheaper tickets.
The move, borne of Covid-19 fears, might unintentionally be a blueprint for a more inclusive A.I. conference that many in the industry have demanded for years.
NeurIPS became a pillar of the world’s conversation on cutting edge A.I. research following the A.I. boom that started in 2012, after a team of Canadian researchers proved a fringe…
