The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference that has talks as well as presentations and workshops.
The meeting was first proposed back in 1986 at the invitation-only Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing by The California Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories. NIPS was meant as a complementary open interdisciplinary meeting dedicated for multidisciplinary researchers exploring biological and artificial neural networks.
The first NIPS began in 1987, with its founder and information theorist Ed Posner as the conference president and learning theorist Yaser Abu-Mostafa and computational neurobiologist James Bower as co-program chairman.
In NIPS early meetings, they included a wide range of topics to solve engineering problems to the uses of computer models as a way to understand biological nervous systems.
Since then, especially as artificial intelligence became one of the most studied field, the meetings diverged and included papers on machine learning, AI and their statistics.
In later years, the Conference organizers considered abandoning the NIPS name, because of the name's connotation with the word nipples.
After surveying 2270 conference participants, the conference organizers initially decided to keep the name. At the survey, most women agreed to change the name, while most men participants disagreed.
However, on November 17th, 2018, the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation Board of Trustees still decided to keep the name, but agreed to change the official acronym of the conference from NIPS to NeurIPS, which originated from the community:
"The name NeurIPS has sprung up organically as an alternative acronym, and we’re delighted to see it being adopted."