[davmre]

To be fair, calling it "Neural Information Processing Systems" isn't significantly more informative. The name is just a quirk of history; NIPS in its modern form includes research in all areas of machine learning, not just neural nets.

[_delirium]

In fact for some years neural networks were very out of fashion there, and it was almost purely a statistical machine learning conference. I tend to just think of it as a machine-learning conference named "NIPS", which stands for something historical (like Perl and Lisp do).