[andrea_s]

Since NIPS is a very prestigious conference, I'd expect a lot of submitted papers (perhaps a vast majority of them) would fall in a grey area between "clearly unsuitable" and "clearly suitable". I personally think there are too many factors at play in evaluating a series of papers - no objective sorting can really exist.

A note for people outside the academic Machine Learning field: NIPS is widely believed to be on a different level from the rest - during my PhD, my advisor used to say that a NIPS paper would be on par with a paper published on a good journal, resume-wise. The difference is especially striking if you've had the chance to attend other conferences (including, alas, IEEE-sponsored events) - that are, with very few exceptions, fairly terrible from a scientific point of view.

[drpgq]

CVPR is pretty good.