“The NIPS foundation is welcoming of all attendees and the diversity of opinions they bring.” Safeguarding this principle of academic freedom means that the conference must be accessible to everyone. Recent changes in the United States’ immigration policy make it difficult or impossible for many nationalities to attend NIPS 2017 in Long Beach, California, and participate in the open academic discourse NIPS supports.

To ensure that NIPS remains an open forum for research, we ask the organisers to move the primary venue to a location outside of the US, where people from all nationalities can attend. We also ask NIPS to make provisions for those trapped in the US to participate as fully as possible (e.g. through live streams).

Please let us know what, if any, are the obstacles to making this happen. We would especially like to know the relative numbers of people affected inside and outside the US, to better inform decision-making. We want to support you in making this as easy as possible, so that we can support the attendance of people of all nationalities as fairly as possible. Thank you for all your work in organizing NIPS!