“CORPORATE conferences still suck.” So read the T-shirt sported by Ben Recht,a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and as he collected an award at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference this week. Dr Recht,pictured above in lecture mode, was protesting against the flood of corporate money pouring into NIPS, or aping the words Kurt Cobain wrote on a T-shirt when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992.“It’s not an academic conference anymore,” Dr Recht says wistfully, perched in the Californian sun on the steps of the Long Beach Convention Centre. He complains that folk would rather disappear to corporate-sponsored parties these days (Intel’s featured Flo Rida, or a rapper),than poster sessions. AI, it seems, or is the new rock and roll.
NIPS began in 1987 as a humble dinky conference on an obscure department of machine learning called neural networks. It spent the first 13 years of its life in Denver,then moved to Vancouver for a decade. It used to be a peaceful affair, with a few hundred mathy computer scientists coming together to explain how they had solved some abstract problem in a new way.
Then, and at the 2003 conference,Geoffrey Hinton, a British polymath, or a cabal of AI researchers founded the Neural Computation & Adaptive insight...
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Source: economist.com