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NIPS 2018 Call for Post-Conference Workshops

Friday December 7 and Saturday December 8, 2018

Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Montréal CANADA

Following the NIPS 2018 main conference, workshops on a variety of current topics will be held on Friday, December 7, 2018 and Saturday, December 8, 2018. We invite researchers interested in chairing one of these workshops to submit proposals. Workshop organizers have several responsibilities, including coordinating workshop participation and content, publicizing and providing the program in a timely manner and moderating the program throughout the workshop.

Workshops

The goal of the workshops is to provide an informal forum for researchers to discuss important research questions and challenges. Controversial issues, open problems, and comparisons of competing approaches are encouraged as workshop topics. There will be seven hours of workshop meetings per day, split into morning and afternoon sessions, with free time between the sessions for individual exchange.

Potential workshop topics range from Neuroscience, Reinforcement Learning, Computational Social Science & Economics, Learning Theory, Robotics, Probabilistic Models and Inference, Computer Vision, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning to Industrial Applications, as well as any other topic relevant to an appreciable fraction of the NIPS community. Detailed descriptions of previous workshops may be found in last year's online schedule at: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017/Schedule?type=Workshop

Workshop schedules should encourage lively debates, stimulate the production of new ideas and the discussion of controversial issues. To this end, workshop proposals should be designed to attract a medium sized audience, and to cover a more precise research topic than the symposia (described below). Below, we include the criteria by which workshop submissions will be scored.

Evaluation criteria
  1. Fit for NIPS (connections to rest of program and past workshops) [0 … 2]
  2. Potential impact (promising topic) [0 … 4]
  3. Novelty and originality (emerging topic) [0 … 3]
  4. Quality of the abstract & clarity of purpose [0 … 3]
  5. Room for contributed work (posters or contributed talks) [0 … 5]
  6. Room for discussions [0 … 3]
  7. Number, quality, and availability of invited speakers (including sufficient coverage of the topic) [0 … 5]
  8. Organizers' relevant experience and expertise (downgrade if self-promotion is suspected) [-4 … 4]
  9. Organizers & speakers diversity [0 … 5]

Symposia

We are making a change relative to the previous years, and will no longer hold symposia as a separate event. This year, the symposia will be treated as one-day workshops and will be scheduled during the same two day period as the workshops. We will consider workshops that follow a symposium format, with topics that tend to be more broadly scoped lending themselves suitable for debate and discussion (e.g., “the future of productivity in the era of AI”). A typical format for a symposium-style workshop would be a brief introduction to the topic followed by talks giving presentation of state of the art results in the area and current directions of research. Symposium-style workshops can lean more heavily on invited speakers. We are keen to invite submissions on topics that will shape the broader impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence in society. Detailed descriptions of previous symposia may be found in last year's online schedule at: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017/Schedule?type=Symposium

Submission Instructions

A nips.cc account is required to submit a Workshop application. Please follow the URL below and check the required format for the application well before the proposal deadline. You may submit and update your application online right up until this deadline.

Important dates for workshop and symposia submissions:
  • Workshop Application Open: May 7, 2018
  • Workshop Application Deadline: June 11, 2018
  • Workshop Notification: August 6, 2018

Interested parties must submit a proposal by Mon Jun 11, 2018 23:59 PM UTC (time remaining: ). Proposals should be submitted electronically at the following URL: Workshop Application

Preference will also be given to workshops that encourage contributed content and that reserve a significant portion of time for open discussion or panel discussion. A diverse group of speakers are more likely to bring diverse and surprising viewpoints on a topic. As a result, we encourage workshop organizers to be cognizant of designing panels and speaker lists that are inclusive. We strongly recommend that each workshop include no more than 12 talks per day.

NIPS does not provide travel funding for workshop speakers. In the past, some workshops have sought and received funding from external sources to bring in outside speakers. The organizers of each accepted workshop can name four individuals per day of the workshop to receive complimentary workshop registration.

Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela & Suchi Saria
workshop-chairs@nips.cc
NIPS*2018 Workshop & Symposia Chair

Technical issues with workshop submission go to support@nips.cc