NeuIPS Meetup Update

Louvere Walker-Hannon (Senior Application Engineer, MathWorks)

Anoush Najarian (Software Engineering Manager, MathWorks)

Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan (Team Leader, RIKEN Center for AI project)

The Meetup Chairs

The Meetup Chairs would like to update you about NeurIPS meetups, an initiative pioneered at NeurIPS last year that we are excited to be building on. NeurIPS meetups are intended to construct a worldwide, distributed presence for NeurIPS.

The goal of this blog post is to share the revised format for NeurIPS Meetups 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new changes in the format are

• The meetups are virtual only.
• There will only be regular meetups and no supermeetups.
• Meetups will be able to leverage publicly available NeurIPS orals, keynotes, tutorials.

What are NeurIPS meetups?

A NeurIPS meetup is a local event hosted during the NeurIPS conference, leveraging conference videos and local content, with a duration ranging from a few hours to a full week, and bringing together participants from one or more companies, universities, and/or the public. Meetups are governed by the NeurIPS Code of Conduct.

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, NeurIPS meetups will be virtual only.

NeurIPS Meetups debuted in 2019, with 75 meetups hosted in 35 countries on 6 continents, thanks to hard work by our meetup hosts and supporters worldwide, and help from BAI (Black in AI) and WiMLDS (Women in Machine Learning and Data Science). We were delighted that 50% of our hosts were women. The country with the most meetups was Nigeria, ahead of the next country by 50%. In 2020, we’d love to expand on this success and introduce new elements.

The goal of NeurIPS meetups is to open up access to communities worldwide and to connect participants by geographic area and language. With this, we hope to support the growth of AI expertise around the world, including in underrepresented communities in tech, and to fuel innovation responsibly.

How can you get involved?

Today, we re-launched the Call for Meetups. If you wish to organize a NeurIPS meetup, submit your proposal by filling out this form. If you have any questions, send us an email at neurips2020-meetup-chairs@googlegroups.com.

What do we want NeurIPS meetups to be?

We’d love to encourage awesome events where hosts and participants do the following:

• Leverage recordings of NeurIPS sessions to share technical content.
• Host live sessions with local AI researchers and practitioners, including local authors of accepted NeurIPS papers.
• Encourage a connection with collocated affinity groups, such as WiML (Women in Machine Learning) and BAI (Black in AI).
• Gather communities around the same time as NeurIPS, adjusted for their local time zone.
• Have freedom to adapt to local constraints and interests.

What have we done so far?

We had launched a Call for Meetups and published a blog post in May 2020, and are now updating both based on COVID-19.

We have received and reviewed a first round of proposals, and are opening up for a new round with an updated Call for Meetups and this updated blog post.

We will maintain a map of planned NeurIPS 2020 meetups. We’ll continue to update it as new meetups are approved.

We hope you like these initiatives. If you have any comments, feel free to send us an email at neurips2020-meetup-chairs@googlegroups.com.

Louvere, Anoush and Emtiyaz