Along with ICLR and ICML, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificial intelligence research.

[1] The conference is currently a double-track meeting (single-track until 2015) that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by parallel-track workshops that up to 2013 were held at ski resorts.

NeurIPS was designed as a complementary open interdisciplinary meeting for researchers exploring biological and artificial Neural Networks.

[2] Research presented in the early NeurIPS meetings included a wide range of topics from efforts to solve purely engineering problems to the use of computer models as a tool for understanding biological nervous systems.

[4] The first proceedings was published in book form by the American Institute of Physics in 1987, and was entitled Neural Information Processing Systems,[5] then the proceedings from the following conferences have been published by Morgan Kaufmann (1988–1993), MIT Press (1994–2004) and Curran Associates (2005–present) under the name Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

[6] Along with machine learning and neuroscience, other fields represented at NeurIPS include cognitive science, psychology, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory.