The crown jewel of AI conferences each year is the NeurIPS conference, which is regularly over-subscribed, and which usually takes place in pretty cities such as Montreal, Vancouver, and Barcelona.
This year, the event was fully virtual because of the pandemic. While not as scenic, it was a well-organized, very rich six days of poster sessions, oral presentations, tutorials, workshops, symposia, invited talks, and some virtual wine and cheese thrown in, ending this past Friday, December 11th. They even managed to do some neat things with poster sessions. The whole conference as made possible via the open-source software Miniconf[1], along with use of Zoom and RocketChat.
Here's a rundown of some of the highlights. This is by no means a comprehensive survey. For the full conference schedule, see the NeurIPS site here[2].
Industrial AI
Sunday, December 6th, kicked off with the Expo, a showcase of industrial uses of machine learning. The day included workshops running about four hours long with multiple presentations from researchers at Apple, Google, Netflix, IBM and Facebook, among others.
Interesting presentations included a whole workshop by Google on using graphs in various ways, including neural network operations over graphs. A session by Apple dove into details of how the recently unveiled M1 chip in the Mac is able to speed up training of models in TensorFlow. The company is even posting its tweaked TensorFlow code on GitHub for downloading.
Netflix included a wealth of material