few commentators were criticizing the abbreviation as encouraging sexism due to its association with the word nipples, and as being a slur against Japanese. The board changed the abbreviation to "NeurIPS" in November 2018. Topics Along with machine learning and neuroscience, other fields represented at NeurIPS include cognitive science, psychology, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory. Over the years, NeurIPS became a premier conference on machine learning and although the 'Neural' in the NeurIPS acronym had become something of a historical relic, the resurgence of deep learning in neural networks since 2012, fueled by faster computers and big data, has led to achievements in speech recognition, object recognition in images, image captioning, language translation and world championship performance in the game of Go, based on neural architectures inspired by the hierarchy of areas in the visual cortex (ConvNet) and reinforcement learning inspired by the basal ganglia (Temporal difference learning). Notable affinity groups have emerged from the NeurIPS conference and displayed diversity, including Black in AI (in 2017), Queer in AI (in 2016), and others. Named lectures In addition to invited talks and symposia, NeurIPS also organizes two named lectureships to recognize distinguished researchers. The NeurIPS Board introduced the Posner Lectureship in honor of NeurIPS founder Ed Posner; two Posner Lectures were given each year up to 2015. Past lecturers have included: 2021 – Peter Bartlett 2018 – Joëlle Pineau 2017 – John Platt 2016 – Yann LeCun 2015 – Zoubin Ghahramani and Vladimir Vapnik 2014 – Michael Kearns and John Hopfield 2013 – Daphne Koller and Peter Dayan 2012 – Thomas Dietterich and Terry Sejnowski 2011 – Rich Sutton and Bernhard Schölkopf 2010 – Josh Tenenbaum and Michael I. Jordan In 2015, the NeurIPS Board introduced the Breiman Lectureship to highlight work in statistics relevant to conference topics. The lectureship was named for statistician Leo Breiman, who served on the NeurIPS Board from 1994 to 2005. Past lecturers have included: 2021 – Gabor Lugosi 2020 – Marloes Maathuis 2019 – Bin Yu 2018 – David Spiegelhalter 2017 – Yee Whye Teh 2016 – Susan Holmes 2015 – Robert Tibshirani The NIPS experiment In NIPS 2014, the program chairs duplicated 10% of all submissions and sent them through separate reviewers to evaluate randomness in the reviewing process. Several researchers interpreted the result. Regarding whether the decision in NIPS is completely random or not, John Langford writes: "Clearly not—a purely random