The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems was founded in 1987, with information theorist Ed Posner as its first president, and for three decades it went by the acronym NIPS. By 2018 a growing number of researchers argued the name was a problem: it was, in their words, vulnerable to crude puns and contributed to an unwelcoming environment, particularly for women in the field. The debate sharpened in early 2018 when faculty and students sent a letter to organizers calling for a change.
The conference board first ran a poll and announced that there was no clear consensus for a new name, so NIPS would stay. That decision triggered a backlash, including an online petition and threats of a boycott from people in both academia and industry. Within weeks the board reversed course. In November 2018 the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation adopted NeurIPS as the official acronym, noting that the alternative had sprung up organically in the community, and the conference moved its website from nips.cc to neurips.cc just before that year’s meeting.
The episode became a small landmark in a larger conversation about culture and inclusion in AI research, running in parallel with debates over harassment, representation, and bias at major conferences in the same period.
Why business readers should care: the name change is a compact example of how research communities, like companies, weigh culture and inclusion alongside technical work, and how quickly a reversal can follow when a community pushes back.