The conference grew in attendees by nearly 60%, but if you paid attention to the submissions only went up by 10%.

There’ll be many summaries of papers and ideas, but as I was trying to digest everything, the thought that occurred to me was people.

Growth presents opportunities and challenges, and as a conference we are experiencing them both. Our role as researchers is to both innovate and

Gardening and Farming analogy?

The foundation of the conference is the diversity of the interests. Looking around

I don’t know what my highlights were, because understanding them will take some looking back. So to substitute, I want to run through some of my highlights of NIPS and meetings past.

Over ten years ago, when the NIPS workshops were in Whistler, I was approached by a student who wanted to visit Sheffield. He went on to visit, and has remained a collaborator and confidant. He currently runs the applied machine learning team at Facebook.

Speaking of Whistler, I stopped skiing at NIPS because most of the main business used to happen during the ‘ski break’. I had about

at the NIPS workshops, a student working with Carl Rasmussen caught me at the poster session. He asked if he could visit Sheffield, and by June In NIPS 2005, at the wSo the headlines say the conference grew, by over 1400 attendees, nearly 60%. But the submissions grew by less: only 10%. That means that a large number of attendees were there to find out what was going on: but what’s lesreading further you soon see that the