The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is a single track meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. It began in 1987 as a computational cognitive science conference, and was held in Denver, Colorado until 2000. From 2001 until 2010 the conference was held in Vancouver, Canada. In 2011, the conference will be held in Granada, Spain. Beginning in 2012, the conference will move to Lake Tahoe for an extended period.
Papers in early NIPS proceedings tended to use neural networks as a tool for understanding how the human brain works, which attracted researchers with interests in biological learning systems as well as those interested in artificial learning systems. Since then, the biological and artificial systems research streams have diverged, and recent NIPS proceedings are dominated by papers on machine learning, artificial intelligence and statistics, although computational neuroscience remains an aspect of the conference.
Besides machine learning and neuroscience, other fields represented at NIPS include cognitive science, psychology, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory. Neural networks are now rarely seen at NIPS, having declined in popularity compared to tools such as support vector machines and Bayes nets. As a result, the 'Neural' in the NIPS acronym is now something of a historical relic, and the conference spans a wide range of topics.
The proceedings from the conferences have been published in book form by MIT Press and Morgan Kaufmann under the name Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
The meeting is related to the COSYNE meetings held in Salt Lake City, Utah.