To be fair, calling it "Neural Information Processing Systems" isn't significantly more informative. The name is just a quirk of history; NIPS in its modern form includes research in all areas of machine learning, not just neural nets.
In fact for some years neural networks were very out of fashion there, and it was almost purely a statistical machine learning conference. I tend to just think of it as a machine-learning conference named "NIPS", which stands for something historical (like Perl and Lisp do).
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To be fair, calling it "Neural Information Processing Systems" isn't significantly more informative. The name is just a quirk of history; NIPS in its modern form includes research in all areas of machine learning, not just neural nets.
In fact for some years neural networks were very out of fashion there, and it was almost purely a statistical machine learning conference. I tend to just think of it as a machine-learning conference named "NIPS", which stands for something historical (like Perl and Lisp do).