Announcing the NeurIPS 2022 Financial Assistance Programs

by Ignatius Ezeani and Erin Grant

The NeurIPS Foundation is proud to provide financial support to individuals for whom attending NeurIPS 2022 (in person or virtually) would cause a financial burden in the form of the NeurIPS 2022 Financial Assistance programs. These programs will prioritize student and junior postdoc conference authors at NeurIPS 2022 to support early-career researchers in presenting their work at the conference. In addition, we aim to use any remaining funds allocated for financial assistance to support inclusion at NeurIPS, and invite applications for financial assistance on the grounds of diversity and accessibility, affinity group membership, financial hardship and cost of attendance, and first-time attendance.

We have broken financial assistance down into several programs: the Scholar Award program, the Volunteering program, and the general Financial Assistance application. If you have an accepted paper at the conference, you will receive support if you apply for a Scholar Award. For those without an accepted paper at the conference, you must apply to be a Volunteer (for registration support), or apply to be a Volunteer AND apply for additional Financial Assistance (for both registration and accommodation support). (We will not consider Financial Assistance applications without an accompanying Volunteer application.) 

Financial assistance at this year’s event will come in the form of complimentary registration to attend NeurIPS 2022 and/or a complimentary hotel stay for several days near the event venue. This support structure enables us to balance the complexity of scaling financial assistance for an increased in-person audience with our aim to support as many participants as possible to attend the conference. In addition, the reimbursement model of past years’ NeurIPS required awardees to pay up-front for expenses and to wait until after the conference for reimbursement, which is financially burdensome and left some international awardees unable to access their financial support.

However, due to the structure of this year’s support, NeurIPS will be unable to provide reimbursement for travel or per diem expenses, even for eligible participants. We encourage participants in need of such support to explore the affinity groups and workshops at NeurIPS, many of which are running their own financial assistance programs.

We aim for a quick turnaround of decisions so that attendees can finalize plans to attend NeurIPS as soon as possible. (See an earlier blog post by the General Chairs to get an idea of how NeurIPS 2022 is organized.) The deadline for applications for NeurIPS 2022 Financial Assistance is October 3rd, 2022, at 6 PM PT, and we will notify you of a decision by October 7th, 2022.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post from us, the DIA Chairs, about other aspects of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility support at NeurIPS 2022. (For example, NeurIPS will be providing free onsite child care this year at the event.) In the meantime, if you have any questions about the financial assistance programs, or about accommodations and support at in-person components of NeurIPS 2022, please do not hesitate to contact us at <diversity-chairs@neurips.cc>.