Announcing the NeurIPS 2022 Affinity Workshops
by Arjun Subramonian, Kehinde Aruleba, and Sunipa Dev
We are happy to announce this year’s affinity workshops co-located with NeurIPS.
What are affinity groups?
At NeurIPS, affinity groups promote and support the ideas and voices of marginalized communities and raise awareness of issues that affect their members.
There is a need for members of affinity groups to have more opportunities to showcase their work, participate and network at NeurIPS. The main aim of workshops is to encourage people to showcase their work and step into the NeurIPS community. Unlike other workshops, affinity group workshops are more loosely defined and meant to promote diversity and inclusion. The idea of having affinity group workshops is to establish research communities out of affinity groups and raise awareness of the challenges faced by their members. Furthermore, affinity group socials provide safe, inclusive spaces for members of affinity groups to socialize and network.
What kind of events do affinity groups offer at conferences?
Affinity groups organize workshops and social events for their members at conferences, which the D&I committee provides support. The main aim of the workshops is to encourage people to showcase their work and step into the NeurIPS community. Most affinity events at NeurIPS this year will take place on Monday, November 28 (in-person) and Monday, December 5 (virtual). Affinity groups will announce specific times closer to the conference.
What can NeurIPS attendees do to support affinity groups?
Participate! Actively attending and participating in panels and sessions for discussions about issues that are relevant to the affinity groups goes a long way in helping promote their cause. We request all members of our community to participate actively!
Indigenous in AI workshop
The workshop will provide a brief overview of Indigenous in AI and a nascent ecology of community impacting AI research. AI research, such as automatic speech recognition, is beginning to transform Indigenous communities. If people are not empowered to conduct and direct this research, the transformations will be negative. The workshop will also host a discussion about Indigenous in AI in partnership with Natives in Tech held their first Lakota AI Code Camp in 2022. Held at Black Hills State University within the sacred Black Hills, the camp introduced Lakota students to Python, data science, deep learning, and app-building with Unity. Additionally, there will be a microtalk session that gathers Indigenous voices from across the globe to present their AI work in the community. It will be an opportunity to hear about work from a diverse set of perspectives on research that impacts Indigenous communities from New Zealand, North America, and Australia. Finally, there will be a brief recap on the topics covered throughout the day and calls to action for people to continue to engage with Indigenous in AI. Contact rng.wlf@gmail.com or mbgrimshaw@gmail.com for questions.
Black in AI workshop
Black in AI exists to create a space for sharing ideas, foster collaborations, and discuss initiatives to increase the presence of Black individuals in the field of AI. As one of the biggest AI research conferences, NeurIPS is a great opportunity for many researchers in the community to learn about current research in the field and expand their network. Since the start of the workshop in 2017, many members of Black in AI have walked away from their experience at NeurIPS with internship offers, graduate program advisors, mentorship, and renewed energy to continue working in the field. The workshop hopes to continue to bridge the gap between Black researchers and the AI community at large. For more information, please visit the Black in AI website.
Global South in AI workshop
The Global South in AI workshop is a design thinking workshop with a hybrid zoom session of global south innovators to arrive at actionable insights about commons problems, potential solutions and identifying shared resources for open datasets for translations, transliterations, language model generators, benchmarks and speech recognition for Global south languages. For more information, please visit the Global South in AI website.
Queer in AI workshop
Over the past years, it has been observed that the voices of marginalized queer communities – especially transgender, non-binary and queer BIPOC folks – have been neglected. The purpose of this workshop is to highlight the issues faced by these communities through talks and panel discussions on these topics. For more information, please visit the Queer in AI website.
LatinX in AI workshop
The LatinX in AI research workshop is a one-day event with invited speakers, oral presentations, and posters. The event brings together faculty, graduate students, research scientists, and engineers for an opportunity to connect and exchange ideas. There will be a panel discussion and a mentoring session to discuss current research trends and career choices in artificial intelligence and machine learning, highlighting the unique challenges of LatinX identifying researchers. The workshop aims to create a platform for the work of Latinx researchers and we invite everyone to attend. For more information, please visit the LatinX in AI website.
Women in ML workshop
The goals and activities of WiML are aligned with WiML’s mission to
- Increase the number of women and non-binary individuals in machine learning
- Help them succeed professionally and,
- Increase their impact in the machine learning community
The workshop plans to feature speakers who are women or nonbinary to give talks on their research, organize mentorship sessions to discuss relevant topics, and encourage networking. It will encourage and foster research conversations and help participants develop collaboration opportunities. There will also be poster sessions for participants to present a broader array of work and exchange feedback. For more information, please visit the Women in ML website.
North Africans in ML workshop
The workshop will include talks, poster sessions, as well as a shared task relating to ML in North Africa. It will have both archival and non-archival tracks and invited talks. Junior researchers and students interested in NLP from North African institutions and beyond (academia and industry) are welcome to present their new work as well as completed or ongoing research projects or ideas. For more information, please visit the North Africans in ML website.