# NeurIPS 1987: The First Conference

NeurIPS 1987 was the inaugural Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, held in Denver, Colorado, in 1987. It established an open interdisciplinary forum for researchers in biological and artificial neural networks, later becoming a premier machine learning conference.

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS, is an annual machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held in December. Along with ICLR and ICML, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificial intelligence research. The conference includes three days of invited talks along with oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by two days of workshops and competitions.

The first NeurIPS conference took place in 1987 in Denver, Colorado, United States. It was designed as an open interdisciplinary meeting for researchers exploring biological and artificial [neural networks](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/neural-network), complementing the invitation-only Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing organized by the California Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories. The founding reflected a multidisciplinary approach, with information theorist Ed Posner serving as conference president and learning theorist Yaser Abu-Mostafa as program chairman.

## Founding and Early Years

The NeurIPS meeting was first proposed in 1986 at the annual Snowbird Meeting, organized by the California Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories. The first conference was sponsored by the IEEE. Research presented in the early NeurIPS meetings covered a wide range of topics, from purely engineering problems to using computer models to understand biological nervous systems. Since then, the biological and artificial systems research streams have diverged, and recent proceedings have been dominated by papers on [machine learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/machine-learning), [artificial intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-intelligence), and statistics.

The first proceedings were published in book form by the American Institute of Physics in 1987, titled *Neural Information Processing Systems*. Subsequent proceedings were published by Morgan Kaufmann (1988–1993), MIT Press (1994–2004), and Curran Associates (2005–present) under the name *Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems*.

## Growth and Evolution

From 1987 until 2000, NeurIPS was held in Denver, Colorado. Since then, the conference has moved to various locations, including Vancouver, Canada (2001–2010), Granada, Spain (2011), Lake Tahoe, United States (2012–2013), Montreal, Canada (2014–2015), Barcelona, Spain (2016), Long Beach, United States (2017), Montreal again in 2018, and Vancouver in 2019. Reflecting its origins at Snowbird, Utah, the meeting was accompanied by workshops at a nearby ski resort until 2013, when it outgrew ski resorts.

The conference was originally abbreviated as "NIPS." By 2018, some commentators criticized the abbreviation for encouraging sexism and being a slur against Japanese. The board changed the abbreviation to "NeurIPS" in November 2018.

## Topics and Impact

Along with machine learning and neuroscience, other fields represented at NeurIPS include cognitive science, psychology, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory. Over the years, NeurIPS became a premier conference on machine learning. Although the "Neural" in the acronym had become somewhat historical, the resurgence of [deep learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/deep-learning) in neural networks since 2012, fueled by faster computers and big data, led to achievements in speech recognition, object recognition in images, image captioning, language translation, and world championship performance in the game of Go. These advances were based on neural architectures inspired by the hierarchy of areas in the visual cortex (ConvNet) and reinforcement learning inspired by the basal ganglia (temporal difference learning).

Notable affinity groups have emerged from the NeurIPS conference, including Black in AI (in 2017) and Queer in AI (in 2016), displaying diversity within the community.

## Named Lectures

In addition to invited talks and symposia, NeurIPS organizes two named lectureships. The Posner Lectureship, honoring founder Ed Posner, was introduced by the NeurIPS Board; two Posner Lectures were given each year up to 2015. Past lecturers include Josh Tenenbaum and Michael I. Jordan (2010), Rich Sutton and Bernhard Schölkopf (2011), Thomas Dietterich and Terry Sejnowski (2012), Daphne Koller and Peter Dayan (2013), Michael Kearns and John Hopfield (2014), Zoubin Ghahramani and Vladimir Vapnik (2015), Yann LeCun (2016), John Platt (2017), Joëlle Pineau (2018), Yoshua Bengio (2019), Christopher Bishop (2020), and Peter Bartlett (2021).

The Breiman Lectureship, introduced in 2015, highlights work in statistics relevant to conference topics. It is named for statistician Leo Breiman, who served on the NeurIPS Board from 1994 to 2005. Past lecturers include Robert Tibshirani (2015), Susan Holmes (2016), Yee Whye Teh (2017), David Spiegelhalter (2018), Bin Yu (2019), Marloes Maathuis (2020), Gabor Lugosi (2021), Emmanuel Candes (2022), Susan Murphy (2023), and Arnaud Doucet (2024).

## Review Consistency Experiment

In NIPS 2014, program chairs duplicated 10% of all submissions and sent them through separate reviewers to evaluate randomness in the reviewing process. The result showed that about 60% of duplicated submissions received the same accept/reject decision. John Langford noted that a purely random decision would have arbitrariness of about 78%, concluding that the reviewing process is mostly arbitrary. In NeurIPS 2021, the experiment was repeated, finding similar levels of inconsistency: 23% of duplicated submissions received different decisions, and 50.6% of accepted papers would have been rejected under re-review.

## Locations

The conference has been held in various cities: Denver, Colorado (1987–2000); Vancouver, Canada (2001–2010); Granada, Spain (2011); Stateline, Nevada (2012–2013); Montreal, Canada (2014–2015); Barcelona, Spain (2016); Long Beach, California (2017); Montreal (2018); Vancouver (2019); Vancouver (2020, virtual); virtual (2021); New Orleans, Louisiana (2022–2023); Vancouver (2024); San Diego, California and Mexico City, Mexico (2025); and Sydney, Australia, with satellite events in Atlanta and Paris (2026).

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Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/neurips-first-conference-1987
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
Last updated: 2026-09-09T02:02:08.199531+00:00