The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is one of the most prestigious conferences for machine learning researchers. This year the conference brought more than 8,000 attendants together, to discuss and share the latest research advancement on machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, reinforcement learning, optimization etc. Being able to attend the conference was a very valuable experience that greatly enriched and strengthened the existing achievements of the research.

The conference began with opening remarks by Brendan Frey and Kate Crawford, and continued with interactive panel discussions, poster presentations and spotlight on topics of interest to industrial and academic researchers in AI. The symposium held during the conference also covers frontier research issues on meta-learning, interpretable machine learning, deep reinforcement learning, and how AI can be explored in a way to better benefit society.

Additionally, NIPS is co-located with Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop this year. I have had the enthusiasm for attending WiML and meet fellow female researchers since 2015. At WiML, I presented and shared my research work titled “Snapshot Ensembles: Train 1, Get M for Free”. Through participating in the workshop, I met female peers and faculty role models in the field. It was extremely valuable to engage in substantive technical and professional conversations in a positive, supportive environment.

Overall, the conference provided a good venue to share my ideas with others, and also provided the opportunity to meet leading researchers there and hear about the state of the art work on deep learning. I gained new insight into possible research topics, and greatly benefitted my PhD thesis research.