The first NIPS conference
Seventy-five researchers of biological and artificial neural networks met in Denver for what became the principal conference in machine learning.
Why it matters
A direction pushed out of the main conferences made one of its own, and thirty years later that one defined the field.
The founders were Edward Posner and Yaser Abu-Mostafa of Caltech. The IEEE Information Theory Group sponsored it, which is why the name says information processing rather than computation. The intent was interdisciplinary: neuroscientists and engineers in one room. It grew from seventy-five attendees to tens of thousands.