ALL About NeruIPS 2018!

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SyncedReview

4 min readDec 9, 2018

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NeurIPS 2018 Opens; Best Papers Announced
The 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) kicked off today in Montréal. In their opening remarks this afternoon the NeurIPS organizing committee announced the conference’s major best paper selections and other awards.
(Synced)

NeurIPS2018 Best Paper Awards：
－ Non-delusional Q-learning and value iteration
－ Optimal Algorithms for Non-Smooth Distributed Optimization in Networks
－ Nearly tight sample complexity bounds for learning mixtures of Gaussians via sample compression schemes
－ Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

NeurIPS2018 Test of Time Awards：
－The Tradeoffs of Large-Scale Learning

Vancouver Named NeurIPS 2019 & 2020 Host as Visa Issues Continue to Plague the AI Conference
According to a booklet distributed to attendees, both NeurIPS 2019 and 2020 will take place in Vancouver, making Canada the host country three years in a row. NeurIPS has already been held in Montreal and Vancouver a combined 13 times since the world’s leading AI conference left its Denver base in 2001.
(Synced)

Government of Canada Invests in Artificial Intelligence and Creates Close to 1,000 Middle-Class Jobs
“Today, the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, announced investments of nearly $6.3 million to support six AI businesses in their efforts to scale up and expand into new markets.”
(Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions)

AlphaFold: Using AI for Scientific Discovery
DeepMind shares its first significant milestone in demonstrating how artificial intelligence research can drive and accelerate new scientific discoveries. With a strongly interdisciplinary approach to our work, DeepMind has brought together experts from the fields of structural biology, physics, and machine learning to apply cutting-edge techniques to predict the 3D structure of a protein based solely on its genetic sequence.
(DeepMind)

Adding Diversity to Images with Open Images Extended
Recently, Google AI introduced the Inclusive Images Kaggle competition, part of the NeurIPS 2018 Competition Track, with the goal of stimulating research into the effect of geographic skews in training datasets on ML model performance, and to spur innovation in developing more inclusive models. While the competition has concluded, the broader movement to build more diverse datasets is just beginning.
(Google AI) / More on Google accepted papers on NeurIPS 2018

PyTorch developer ecosystem expands, 1.0 stable release now available
“As the PyTorch ecosystem and community continue to grow with interesting new projects and educational resources for developers, today at the NeurIPS conference we’re releasing PyTorch 1.0 stable.”
(Facebook AI) / More on Facebook accepted papers on NeurIPS 2018

Fun of NeurIPS 2018

@breandan: Dr. David Duvenaud doing double duty deriving differential equations and demonstrating how to be a good dad.

@_willfalcon: When you explain your poster and don’t notice Geoffrey Hinton standing behind you #NeurIPS2018

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