We invite everyone who is part of and/or interested in the ML research scene in Korea. Participants can introduce their own ML research, especially if it's part of NeurIPS 2021. They can also introduce NeurIPS 2021 papers that they find interesting and discuss them with other participants. Other possible discussion topics include (but are not limited to): Korean NLP, computer vision and datasets, ML for post COVID-19 era, and career options in academia/industry in Korea. We welcome everyone from anywhere in the world, as long as you can keep awake if our event falls in the middle of the night for you. Note that we had this same Social at ICLR 2020, 2021 and NeurIPS 2020 with active participation of more than 100 people.

Latinx in AI wants to host a social event with the goal of creating new connections between the NeurIPS community and Latinx researchers across the world. Our event will consist of networking sessions between attendees in Zoom or Gathertown. While our event will target researchers who identify as Latinx, our doors are open to anyone who wants to engage with our community.

The organizers of the event will be Luis Lamb - Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - luisl@latinxinai.org José Luis Lima de Jesus Silva - Linköping University - jsilva@latinxinai.org Andrés Muñoz Medina - Google Research - andresm@latinxinai.org

Women in the United States are more likely to die from childbirth or pregnancy-related causes than other women in the developed world” according to the Public Health Grand Rounds podcast by the Centers for Disease Control. Although, maternal mortality is a global issue the focus will be on maternal mortality in the United States due to familiarity with domestic practices related to this topic. For instance, in 2015 the maternal mortality rate in Finland was 3 deaths/100,000 live births versus in the United States which had 14 deaths/100,000 live births according to the World Factbook from the Central Intelligence Agency. The reason that the number is high for the United States is due to the number of black women that have died and continue to die in the US, due to maternal mortality. “Black women have a maternal mortality rate three times higher than that of white women” according to National Geographic. A question that may arise from many when learning of this data is: why are these deaths occurring at such high rates? A next question for many may be: are these deaths preventable? ". The Public Health Grand Rounds podcast by the Centers for Disease Control podcast further …

This roundtable aims to highlight the experiences of women researchers in tech and promote an engaging discussion around how women can excel in the research science field. GRT will incorporate a minimum of 4 Women researchers who are considered experts in their field at Amazon. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions while a moderator will facilitate guided discussion points throughout the 1 hour session. I would like to add this RSVP link somewhere so that we can gather any questions ahead of time.

https://neurips2021connectingwomeninsc.splashthat.com/

Our presentations are most likely the highest impact activities we have as researchers. They are often quite dense. In those 10 minutes in your conference oral, you have the chance to show your work to a large audience for world-wide recognition. This is both incredibly stressful and difficult to do. The months of research that you've done, with all the ideas and all the results, have to be jam packed in a short time interval, and your audience is tired of the long conference and the information hoses they are drinking from. How do you make the most out of your presentation? How do you make sure that people understand your work, get excited by it, and remember you in the future?

In the first part of the session we will cover:
- How to structure your presentation and storytelling
- Captivating your audience and making them remember you
- Guiding your audience through tough and difficult to parse material
- Dynamic and easy to follow slide creation
- Preparation for the big moment
- Frequent mistakes and the psychology of insecurity.

In the second part you are invited to bring your own presentations, which will be discussed in a …

BigScience is a one-year long research workshop on large multilingual datasets and large language models. It fosters discussions and reflections around the research questions surrounding large language models (capabilities, limitations, potential improvements, bias, ethics, environmental impact) as well as the challenges around creating and sharing such models and datasets for research purposes and among the research community. For the NeurIPS 2021 BigSience Social we are looking forward to:

Technical talks and paper presentations by BigScience working group chairs Invited talks & interdisciplinary discussions on large language models A carbon footprint tutorial A social space for open discussions

METI ‘MEET’ WITH FDL 

FDL will be hosting an official NeurIPS social: METI ’Meet’ (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with Google Cloud, Intel and the SETI Institute. Learn about METI and make and decode messages from competing ‘alien’ planets and (of course) win cool Intel prizes.

 “Where is everybody?” This official NeurIPS social will be a chance to connect with other folks in the rarified space / ML / alien-hunting Venn diagram. You’ll be working together with other aliens to communicate key variables about your home planet and then transmit them into the cosmos (um, via Zoom) for other planetary beings to decrypt! The team that decrypts the most alien messages, wins - and the team that is the most decrypted also wins (assuming no galactic domination intent.) Meet us at NeurIPS on Dec 8th at 10 am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT

This will be an excellent opportunity to convene a community around ML application for space exploration, planetary stewardship of Earth and opportunities for ML in science.

We hope you are able to join us for what will be an inspirational and enjoyable event.

Lapsed" (aka. Former) Physicists are plentiful in the machine learning community. Inspired by Wine and Cheese seminars at many institutions, this BYOWC (Bring Your Own Wine and Cheese) event is an informal opportunity to connect with members of the community.
Hear how others made the transition between fields. Discuss how your physics training prepared you to switch fields or what synergies between physics and machine learning excite you the most. Share your favorite physics jokes your computer science colleagues don't get, and just meet other cool people. Open to everyone, not only physicists; you'll just have to tolerate our humor. Wine and Cheese encouraged, but not required.

Given the many disciplines that encompass ML, it is important that we as researchers better understand academics with differing backgrounds than our own to produce valued contributions.

In this 2-hour social, we pair participants together based on differing levels of experience in related disciplines of ML. These pairings would be determined by a confidential online form. For example, suppose Researcher A identifies as being highly experienced in Reinforcement Learning but has little to no experience in Neuroscience. Researcher A could then be paired with Researcher B, who has a great background in Neuroscience but has had no exposure to Reinforcement Learning. This cycle could repeat every 10 minutes so that every participant can meet a diverse set of researchers across a multitude of disciplines.

To help guide the discussions in these breakout sessions, they will be provided a script of suggested, generic questions to help bridge the gaps of understanding between their fields of expertise. These questions will cover more formal topics such as finding similarity between their fields of study. Some suggested questions may encompass less formal topics such as which leisure activities are commonly pursued by groups of specific disciplines. Participants are encouraged to document these similarities from …

Machine learning and data science activity is seeing a massive growth in India with many universities initiating related academic programmes, many research labs setting their base in India, and many ML and AI based start-ups rapidly expanding in India. This social aims to make NeurIPS attendees aware of career opportunities at these places by facilitating interaction between those interested in exploring career opportunities in India (e.g., graduating students and postdocs) and researchers who are currently based in India, and also create more awareness around ML problems that can have significant impact in the Indian context.

Queer in AI’s demographic survey reveals that most queer scientists in our community do not feel completely welcome in conferences and their work environments, with the main reasons being a lack of queer community and role models. Over the past years, Queer in AI has worked towards these goals, yet we have observed that the voices of marginalized queer communities - especially transgender, non-binary folks and queer BIPOC folks - have been neglected.

Our social is a safe and inclusive casual networking and socializing space for LGBTQIA+ individuals involved with AI that celebrates all queer people around the world. Together with our workshop, our events will create a community space where attendees can learn and grow from connecting with each other, bonding over shared experiences, and learning from each individual’s unique insights into AI, queerness, and beyond!

Join us for 5-minute Ignite talks by women in AI. Excited for the Third Annual Women in AI Ignite at NeurIPS. The idea of Women in AI Ignite Social is based on our experience hosting Women in Tech Ignite sessions at conferences around the world. Everyone is welcome; our speakers are women.

Come learn and share best practices collaborating with researchers around the world, and discuss how to bridge the remote work, cultural, and social divides.

As Grid.ai and PyTorch Lightning are a global remote-first workplace, will be holding two special guest speakers from the company to discuss how they have improved their global research collaboration and communication. Q&A will follow, then we’ll break into networking for the last half of the hour. The whiteboards in our Gather space are meant for sharing collaboration ideas with others in the space.

Let’s come together for an Un-Bookclub book Algorithms of Oppression social at NeurIPS. We’ve been learning a lot from the discussions in the cross-continental book club that we’ve been running out of this book by the celebrated UCLA Professor Dr. Safyia Umoja Noble. We’d love to give you the gift of connection, conversation, and reflection Dr. Noble gave us. We’ll briefly introduce the author’s ideas and do hands-on exercises to seed discussions about the human impact of AI and search engines in our lives. There is no prework for this social and you are not expected to have read the book to participate in the exercises and discussions.

Roundtable Chatroom is a community that fosters communication and sharing of great ideas dedicated to AI and ML practitioners. Our main event is inspired by the roundtable chats back in the physical conference era, where participants discuss a topic for some time before moving on to the next one.

Constrained by the pandemic, we will be using virtual breakout rooms (e.g Zoom) to simulate the ‘roundtables’. To ensure the quality and experience of our discussions, we have invited ‘mentors’ who are passionate about the topic with profound knowledge in their field to lead each breakout room.

The topics we will discuss at NeurIPS 2021 include: The next big thing in AI AI in finance How to develop a research idea? Do we publish too much?

Check out our previous event at ICLR 2021 https://www.roundtable-chatroom.com/ A list of mentors will be finalized soon on the homepage.