Prof. Anima Anandkumar

I am disappointed that you don't see toxic sexism surrounding name change debate and #protestNIPS it is sad that you chose to use Twitter to joke about it. There is so much learning that you need to do. You are blind. I hope you have the humility to admit that. @InclusionInML

There's no toxic sexism in "NIPS" cos it's just an abbreviation and not even a dictionary word. Interpretation of an "abbreviation" is a sign of a person's disposition. This tweet unravels your disposition but not in your favor.

I suggest you search for the old name on your favorite search engine and evaluate what shows up. Or just visit the old name on the .com domain. This is not theoretical, the many double entendres around it created a clearly hostile climate.

I see that the arguments stem from the fact that http://nips.com  is a porn site... That's just unfortunate!!! But the fact that the sitename was lost to porn before the advent of Neural Information Processing Systems does not imply sexist inclinations of the organizers.

We are not talking about organizer intent, we are talking about unfortunate cultural connotations for the term in the US that had concrete negative impact over many years.

But banning existing words have negative consequences: it's against right to free speech, and leads to shortage in vocabulary. Instead, take back use of these words/terms by pointing the search engines to the useful rather the useless. Majority use = language! (2/2)

The slang/derrogatory uses of that word go back at least 80 years. The conference came much later, and stumbled into this. We (I was co-chair and board member) knew it but shrugged it off as trivial. We were wrong.

thank you for saying this!!!!