Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December in Vancouver, Canada. It began in 1987 as a computational cognitive science conference, and was held in Denver, Colorado until 2000.

Papers in early NIPS proceedings tended to use neural networks as a tool for understanding how the human brain works, which attracted researchers with interests in biological learning systems as well as those interested in artificial learning systems. Since then, the biological and artificial systems research streams have diverged, and recent NIPS proceedings are dominated by papers on machine learning, artificial intelligence and statistics, although computational neuroscience remains an aspect of the conference.

Besides machine learning and neuroscience, a number of other fields are represented at NIPS, including cognitive science, psychology, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory. The NIPS conference has a tendency towards a very rapid turnover of "hot topics", so neural networks are now rarely seen at NIPS, having declined in popularity compared to tools such as support vector machines and Bayes nets. As a result, the 'Neural' in the NIPS acronym is now something of a historical relic, and the conference spans a lot less wide range of topics.

The proceedings from the conferences have been published in bookform by MIT Press and Morgan Kaufmann under the name Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, and these proceedings are available freely on the Internet from the URL http://www.nips.cc/.