NeurIPS 2018 Day 0: Expo

This story was first published on www.harald.co

Today was NeurIPS Expo, the zeroth day of this year’s Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Montréal. The Expo is a day with content from industry right before the rest of the conference. Below are some highlights from a few of the sessions I managed to attend.

The Montréal Declaration

An initiative of the University of Montréal, the Declaration “aims to spark public debate and encourage a progressive and inclusive orientation to the development of AI”.

Unlike the Asilomar AI Principles, which were set by experts in the field, the principles of the Montréal Declaration are being set by consultation with the public and take a local (Québec-centric) view rather than trying to solve global issues.

Notably, the Declaration will remain open for revision to account for the fact that societal norms and our understanding of AI will adapt. The next draft of the Declaration, with updated principles, will be published on the 4th of December. [now published: English/French]

Despite an attempt to take opinions from a broad cross-section of the population, there was a significant skew towards highly educated people in the ~500 participant group, as well as towards those working in tech, and towards men.

While the content was interesting, the talk was a little unfocused — very little time was spent on context/setup (whose initiative is this? why?) and a…