Abstract:
There has been substantial recent controversy surrounding the use of the acronym “NIPS” for the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, stemming from the fact that the word “nips” is common slang for nipples, and has historically been used as a racial slur targeting people of Japanese origin. Here, we outline the ways in which this acronym has contributed to a hostile environment towards women in machine learning. We argue that an October 2018 decision by the Neural Information Processing Systems board not to change the name of the conference was based on a misunderstanding of the issues that women face in STEM fields, a poorly-designed survey, and a faulty statistical analysis. We applaud the board for a more recent announcement of the new abbreviation “NeurIPS”, and emphasize that this name change is an important first step towards the creation of a more inclusive environment in machine learning.
Authors:
Daniela M. Witten, Elana J. Fertig, Animashree Anandkumar, Jeff Dean
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