{"id":12152,"date":"2025-01-08T16:18:06","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T16:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/?p=12152"},"modified":"2025-01-08T16:18:09","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T16:18:09","slug":"babys-first-neurips-a-survival-guide-for-conference-newbies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/babys-first-neurips-a-survival-guide-for-conference-newbies\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby&#8217;s First NeurIPS: A Survival Guide for Conference Newbies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>There&#8217;s something very surreal about stepping into your first major machine learning conference: suddenly, all those GitHub usernames, paper authors, and protagonists of heated twitter spats become real people, the hallways are buzzing with discussions of papers you&#8217;ve been meaning to read, and somehow there are 17,000 other people trying to navigate it all alongside you. That was my experience at NeurIPS this year, and despite feeling like a microplankton in an ocean of ML research, I had a grand time. While some of this success was pure luck, much of it came down to excellent advice from the group&#8217;s ML conference veterans and lessons learned through trial and error. So, before the details fade into a blur of posters and coffee breaks, here&#8217;s my guide to making the most of your first major ML conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Navigating the Science<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Prioritise workshops.<\/strong> The workshops, at least for those more application-ly inclined, are absolutely where it&#8217;s at, so don&#8217;t feel rubbish if you reach the end of the main conference track feeling like you haven&#8217;t gained much. For NeurIPS specifically, highlight workshops were Machine Learning for Structural Biology and AIDrugX &#8211; both of these report quite high acceptance rates, so if you&#8217;re set on attending one of these conferences but find applying to the main track a bit daunting, I&#8217;d strongly recommend going for one of them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Plan your poster sessions.<\/strong> If you&#8217;re used to normal-scale conferences, you might think you can find posters of interest by strolling about and window shopping. Spoiler alert: you cannot do this at a conference that 17,000 people are attending! I gained very little from the poster sessions I hadn&#8217;t prepared for. While there&#8217;s some clustering, it&#8217;s not a perfect system, and I certainly missed interesting work I would have caught if I&#8217;d gone through the paper list beforehand.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Navigate the grouping system.<\/strong> One of the tricky parts of these mega-conferences is that the research spans both core ML development and its applications, which leads to some interesting categorisation challenges. For instance, I found relevant papers scattered across different sections &#8211; some were grouped by field (like bioinformatics), while others were organised by methodology (eg in the diffusion models or computer vision sections). <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t skip the expo hall.<\/strong> The larger booths within the expo halls had their own talk schedules that weren&#8217;t a part of the main conference listing &#8211; I&#8217;d recommend stopping by as soon as you arrive so you can plan to include these in your scheduling efforts.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Originality is all you need<\/strong>. There were 11 papers accepted to the conference&#8217;s main track ending in &#8216;is all you need&#8217;. And that&#8217;s all I&#8217;ll say on that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Jobs and Networking<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Update your CV before you go.<\/strong> Trust me, you&#8217;ll thank yourself later when you&#8217;re having a conversation with a potential employer and can confidently (or at least not ashamedly) share your most up-to-date version.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Connect immediately after meeting people.<\/strong> Add\/follow people to your LinkedIn\/Twitter\/X\/Bluesky\/whatever your poison as soon as you&#8217;ve met them. Don&#8217;t wait until you&#8217;re back home &#8211; trying to find &#8216;that guy with the monosyllabic name wearing glasses and a fleece who was interested in generative models&#8217; at an ML conference is like trying to find a very specific needle in a stack of very similar needles.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Always register your interest.<\/strong> Don&#8217;t skip sign-ups to register your interest with companies you might want to work for. At these big conferences, a lot of the best networking happens at private company events that you&#8217;ll only hear about if you&#8217;ve registered your interest on a form or chatted with someone (also, many of these registration forms will ask for your CV &#8211; remember that updated version from earlier?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Practical Tips for Survival<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Find your conference buddies.<\/strong> Despite being an advocate for solo adventures (if you saw me watching Paddington 3 at the cinema alone &#8211; no, you didn&#8217;t), I would have found this conference challenging without a few reliable coffee and meal companions. Not everyone will be as fortunate as I was to attend with the most excellent OPIGlets Nele and Nikhil, but having conference buddies is invaluable. Beyond the social aspect, it&#8217;s particularly helpful for the evening events &#8211; having someone to walk home with in a foreign city late at night is nice (\/essential, depending on your personal demographic). Don&#8217;t worry if you don&#8217;t know anyone before you set off &#8211; the scale of these conferences means it is almost impossible to avoid meeting at least a few other attendees either on your travels to the conference or in your accommodation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Know when to take breaks.<\/strong> This might be more of a personal take, but if you have a slot of the conference where none of the talks are particularly relevant to you or you feel too tired to focus, call it, and go and have a break &#8211; there&#8217;ll always be something on later and I found doing fewer things more well rested to be better than spreading myself too thin. The conference is a marathon, not a sprint, and you&#8217;ll get more value from being fully present for the sessions you do attend than zombie-walking through everything.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Master the app.<\/strong> The conference app is your best friend. Download it, learn it, love it. It&#8217;s essential for keeping track of your schedule, finding rooms, and staying updated on any last-minute changes.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Be selective with swag.<\/strong> When visiting the expo hall, remember that everything you pick up needs to fit in your return luggage. Maybe this comes more naturally to those with weaker hunter-gatherer instincts than I, but trying to layer two hats from unnamed quant research companies on departure day because they wouldn&#8217;t fit in my checked bag looked exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you&#8217;re gearing up for your first big ML conference, remember: you don&#8217;t have to do everything perfectly. Just come prepared, be strategic about your time, and don&#8217;t forget to enjoy the controlled chaos of it all. Everyone there was a first-timer once &#8211; even if some of them pretend they emerged from the womb clutching a NeurIPS badge and a copy of the original transformer paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s something very surreal about stepping into your first major machine learning conference: suddenly, all those GitHub usernames, paper authors, and protagonists of heated twitter spats become real people, the hallways are buzzing with discussions of papers you&#8217;ve been meaning to read, and somehow there are 17,000 other people trying to navigate it all alongside [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[633,52,296,189],"tags":[829],"ppma_author":[559],"class_list":["post-12152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-conferences","category-hints-and-tips","category-machine-learning","tag-neurips"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":559,"user_id":94,"is_guest":0,"slug":"lucy_vost","display_name":"Lucy Vost","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/410b510f70dab77a9fa285069d544f6f8069c1743e6050067edc992e470b551e?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12152"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12170,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12152\/revisions\/12170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12152"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=12152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}