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CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS - NIPS 2008

Neural Information Processing Systems -- Natural and Synthetic
NIPS 2008 Conference -- December 8 - 10, 2008
Hyatt Regency Vancouver, BC, CANADA
http://nips.cc/
Demonstration Proposal Deadline: September 19, 2008

Real-world applications are the ultimate litmus test for intelligent algorithms. And live and interactive demos are the best way to convince people of the power of your ideas!

The Neural Information Processing Systems Conference now provides a venue for showing your live and interactive demonstrations. It has a Demonstration Track that will run in parallel with the popular evening Poster sessions.

Demonstrators will have a chance to show their live interactive demos, for example in areas such as hardware technology, software systems, neuromorphic and biologically-inspired systems and robotics. The only hard rules are that the demo must show novel technology and must be live and interactive!

NIPS 2008 Demonstrations Chair:  Ralf Herbrich (Microsoft Research)


Proposals for demonstrations will be reviewed by the demonstrations chair. Demonstration proposals should be submitted via the web form:

Demonstration Application Form


NIPS is a continually-evolving interdisciplinary conference, which attracts cognitive scientists, computer scientists, engineers, neuroscientists, physicists, statisticians, and mathematicians interested in all aspects of neural and statistical processing and computation. The Demonstration Track enables researchers to highlight scientific advances, systems, and technologies in ways that go beyond conventional poster presentations. It will provide a unique forum for demonstrating advanced technologies (hardware and software), and fostering the direct exchange of knowledge. We hope that this track will stimulate interactions between researchers from different fields or approaches.

Key requirements for Demonstrations is that they be LIVE and INTERACTIVE and that they present a compelling view of an emerging technology. Past Demonstrations Tracks have covered a very wide range. Areas of interest have previously included the following: analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic engineering, computational sensors and actuators, robotics, bioMEMS (micro-electromechanical systems), biomedical instrumentation, neural prostheses, RNA-computation, photonics, real-time multimedia systems, large-scale neural emulators, online learning algorithms, and open-source software toolboxes.

Submissions accepted in the Demonstrations Track will be published on the NIPS web site, but will not appear in printed proceedings. However, submitting your work to the Demonstration Track does not preclude the submission of a companion paper to the regular NIPS Conference; joint submissions are very much encouraged. We also encourage authors to consider organizing a Workshop at NIPS 2008.

NIPS will provide a separate room dedicated for the Demonstration Track. Participants will have access to power strips, tables and poster boards. Participants are responsible for ensuring that their demonstration is sufficiently portable and paying for additional hardware beyond that specified above. 


Demonstrators will be asked to enter information about the nature of the demonstration, in particular they will be asked to describe first the user experience and then the underlying technology. Proposals that are simply papers in disguise will be rejected. This session is for live, interactive experiences that compellingly demonstrate new technology. The demonstrations co-chairs will contact the demonstrators requesting them to report on the state of their demonstration (possibly using pictures and videos) in order to judge whether the demonstration can actually be made functional. Past experience has shown that simpler demonstrations that make just one point are usually most compelling and interesting to attendees.