The world’s most prestigious machine learning conference wraps up in Vancouver this weekend. Synced takes a look at the numbers associated with NeurIPS 2019.

- 33

This year marked the 33rd annual NeurIPS conference.

- 30 & 3

Communication Co-chair Michael Littman told attendees: “This year is only the third time NeurIPS has had a formal relationship with the press. 30 Conferences without, 3 with.” Also, there were 3 awards — Outstanding Paper, Outstanding New Directions Paper, and Test of Time.

- 13,000

With 13,000 people registered, this was the biggest NeurIPS to date.

- 6,743

A record 6,743 paper submissions (49 percent more than last year) reviewed by 4,543 reviewers. An individual reviewing that much content would need to “read 43 pages every single day for a year” noted General Chair Hanna Wallach during her opening remarks on Monday.

- 1,428

1,428 papers made it to the conference, an acceptance rate of 21.6 percent.

36 papers were presented as orals, 164 as 5-minute spotlights, and the remaining 1,228 were posters only.

Submitted and accepted papers by subject area, 2019 vs 2018, from a NeurIPS blog post.

- 79

A total of 79 official NeurIPs meetups in over 35 countries on 6 continents. The most meetups by continent were in Africa (28) and Europe (21); and half the meetup organizers are women. Meetups is a new NeurIPS initiative designed to increase accessibility, reduce the need for air travel, encourage the development of global AI expertise, and generally create “opportunities for researchers and practitioners who cannot physically attend due to space, visa, funding, and time constraints.”

- 158

NeurIPS Diversity and Inclusion Chair Katherine Heller addressed visa issues:

Similar with last year, a group of researchers ran into challenges when they tried to secure visas for the conference. While we tried to get ahead of this, it wasn’t until the broader AI community and many others with ties to NeurIPS reached out to the Canadian government to encourage them to overturn the denials. As of yesterday (Monday), 158 visas have been approved, 14 are still in progress, and 5 were denied. Additionally, over the last two days NeurIPS was able to fly out 7 researchers from Nigeria and Uganda.

- 29

29 demonstrations covering topics and applications such as Robot-Assisted Hair-Brushing, the Melody Slot Machine interactive music system, one-on-one fitness training with an AI avatar, etc.

- 16

16 competitions involving 2,500 participants. Microsoft’sGame of Drones explored challenges building autonomous systems through head-to-head drone races, while AI experts from top US universities organized a sample-efficient reinforcement learning competition in the Minecraft video game environment.

- 9

9 tutorials, including Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Network: from Algorithms to Hardware Architectures which examined methods to enable efficient processing for deep neural networks.

- 51

51 workshops on topics such as Robot Learning: Control and Interaction in the Real World, The third Conversational AI workshop — today’s practice and tomorrow’s potential, Deep Reinforcement Learning,etc.

NeurIPS 2019 is at Vancouver Convention Center. Synced is reporting from the conference, which wraps up Saturday December 14.