
NeurIPS 2019 Notes [pdf] - rebelhit
https://david-abel.github.io/notes/neurips_2019.pdf
======
gautamcgoel
I was just at NeurIPS (gave a spotlight talk in the session on online
learning). TBH, NeurIPS gas grown too big for it's own good; this year there
were 14,000 attendees. It's so big that they had to restrict access to some of
the poster sessions due to overcrowding. It's become very difficult for junior
researchers to find and talk to senior people, due to the sheer size of it
all; honestly, it feels like an overcrowded science fair crossed with an
industry expo. I much prefer AISTATS, which I attended this year in Okinawa,
Japan. Much smaller, more accessible, and with more focus on disseminating
scientific ideas, as it should be.

~~~
softwaredoug
Probably also too many people are focused on a _solution_ , and not problems
for specific domains. Learning more about deep learning is cool, but in
practice, most problems in domains need domain expertise combined with more
mundane models. This is particularly true when you need to rally domain
experts help - folks able to understand logistic regression more easily than a
complex deep learning model.

~~~
MAXPOOL
NeurIPS should be about fundamental science not about applied science and
engineering solutions for specific domains.

Science vs applications would be actually a good way to divide NeurIPS into
two conferences to get focus back: NeurIPS and Applied NeurIPS. One wold
present science, the other tweaks, tricks and methods to solve everyday
problems.

Papers like "Partially Encrypted Deep Learning using Functional Encryption",
"Dancing to Music", "Differentiable Cloth Simulation for Inverse Problems"
would go go the engineering conference for the "most people".

~~~
elcomet
> Partially Encrypted Deep Learning using Functional Encryption

I don't agree about this one. It does seem fundamental science to me.

~~~
nabla9
Encrypting deep learning is problem for practical applications that require
privacy. That's applied science.

~~~
ses1984
How do you suppose you're going to provide theoretical assurance of privacy
and correctness without science?

~~~
nabla9
Maybe I'm wrong but I see this as applied vs fundamental, not "without
science" issue.

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mesut32
Interesting to see the growth of PyTorch
[https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1195568939381776386](https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1195568939381776386)

~~~
The_rationalist
Which bring so much software poverty... So many tasks have a state of the art
accuracy only on tensorflow or only on pytorch. So now someone that actually
care about accuracy must learn both frameworks instead of one but in practice,
he will just not use the state of the art when not available which is just
plain sad.

~~~
1_electron
i understand why there would be differences wrt performance, ease of
deployment, etc, but why would there be significant differences in model
accuracy between tf and pyt? a matrix multiply is a matrix multiply,
regardless of implementation...

~~~
ploika
The matrix multiplications should be the same (down to floating point accuracy
limitations) but there might be very slight differences in how things like
random dropout or stochastic gradient descent work in one framework versus the
other.

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amrrs
Few more NeurIPS related link:
[https://nulldata.substack.com/p/neurips-2019-edition](https://nulldata.substack.com/p/neurips-2019-edition)

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panabee
Website for searching NeurIPS papers:
[https://neurips2019exploration.herokuapp.com/](https://neurips2019exploration.herokuapp.com/)

Not affiliated, just thought it was a helpful tool.

~~~
deepsun
Not all papers are there. Seems like not all workshops posted their papers yet
to NeurIPS Proceedings. E.g. none from Knowledge Representation workshop
([https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2019/Schedule?showEvent=13169](https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2019/Schedule?showEvent=13169)
)

~~~
panabee
Any suggestions for an alternative way to search the papers?

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brailsafe
I didn't even realize the conference was happening until my gf complained
about the attendants of some ai conf downtown. Didn't quite realize how big it
was.

~~~
elcomet
What did she complain about ?

~~~
chestervonwinch
Probably the number of hyperparameters

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cbames89
Dave's a great guy for doing this. I like to peruse his notes just to see what
he thought was important.

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fyp
Were there any videos people thought was particularly worth watching?

Is this the right list?
[https://slideslive.com/neurips#!feed=popular](https://slideslive.com/neurips#!feed=popular)

~~~
amrrs
Celeste Kidd's one was highly spoke about

~~~
thatsenough
Which? Her technical talk on how humans learn [1], or her keynote address on
sexual harassment and the #metoo movement? As far as I know, only the latter
got a standing ovation.

[1]
[https://www.nips.cc/Conferences/2019/Schedule?showEvent=1548...](https://www.nips.cc/Conferences/2019/Schedule?showEvent=15483)

[2] [https://fortune.com/2019/12/09/sexual-harassment-issues-
high...](https://fortune.com/2019/12/09/sexual-harassment-issues-highlighted-
at-a-leading-a-i-conference/)

~~~
0xcde4c3db
The same talk [1] covers both topics. Part of her point is that they're
related via people forming false beliefs about accusations of harassment
(particularly men believing that they're at much greater risk of being accused
than they actually are).

[1] [https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-
know](https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know)

