NIPS 2010 - How to get your paper accepted to NIPS

NIPS 2010 has been going on for half a week already and finally I have the time to write about it.
So many inspiring posters and talks and so many great people to talk to.
I'll start by giving you this years top 9 tips to get your paper accepted to NIPS:

  1. Write a strong abstract.
    A paper with the following abstract got rejected: "This paper is great."
  2. Hide the fact that the paper is recycled.
    One paper was submitted that was obviously resubmitted from ICML. How do we know? It had additional to the line numbers in the new NIPS layout also (and overlapping) the ICML line numbers on both sides.
  3. Carefully maintain anonymity.
    One of the reviewers remarked that he found the authors name in the pdf properties of a submission.
  4. Avoid certain reviewers - apparently some are quite harsh. Sadly I don't have the review in question but since you can't be sure to avoid the reviewer, it's better if you don't know it.
  5. Get your bid in early.
    Someone asked for a talk in spring of 2010.
  6. Words to employ (words that were positively correlated with acceptance):
    Subgradient, polyhedral, treewidth, ..., elephant (we knew they were important!), snowboards, paranormal
  7. Words to avoid (words that were negatively correlated with acceptance):
    Philosopy, acknowledgement, bagging, Carnegie, Mellon, Isomap, LLE
  8. Citations to employ (positively correlated with acceptance):
    Wainwright
  9. Citations to avoid:
    Kohonen, ICML, PLSA, NMF

Enjoy!

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