Yan Liu

By Yan Liu, ICLR  2023 General Chair and Been Kim, ICLR 2023 Senior Program Chair.

Read in 5 mins.

Quick Summary: ICLR 2023 is a five-day hybrid (in person and virtual) conference held 1-5 May at the newly built Kigali Convention Center in Rwanda..  ICLR is proud to host the first AI conference in Africa as our first in-person conference since the pandemic. The venue will host up to 2000 attendees, so please register soon and  arrange your travel. Registration for ICLR 2023 is now open. The organizing committee has  an exciting conference program with several  new initiatives outlined below. We hope to see you in May in Kigali!.

We still remember the excitement of the community when we announced ICLR 2023 would be held in Kigali, Rwanda, and the conference is rapidly approaching. After three years of virtual conferences, this year’s ICLR will be held in-person and online simultaneously.  The decision does not come lightly: the organizing committee and the ICLR board have many rounds of discussions regarding the conference format. We also got feedback from the community and other deep learning and AI conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, etc. 

The recently built Convention Centre/Radisson Blu Hotel in Kigali can host up to 2000 in-person attendees. We currently have on reserve several in-person registration slots for authors of accepted papers who should register before Feb 20 (similarly for workshop paper authors by a later timeline). If you plan to attend the in-person conference, please register as soon as possible. 

Shown below are important program highlights for this year’s conference designed to encourage social interactions and collaborations:

Same as before: keynote talks, oral paper presentations and poster sessions, workshops, sponsor expo talks, and socials; 

Different from before: 

1. Based on recent ICLM and NeurIPS attendees’ feedback,  in-person workshops provide a better experience  and offer valuable  collaboration. Therefore, this year’s main program will be reduced to three days, followed by a two-day hybrid workshop. All keynotes, oral presentations, and posters will be in-person only (livesteram available, Q&A will be through RocketChat for remote attendees).
2. We have introduced a series of new initiatives to engage in-person communications and embrace the AI community in Africa. Specifically, we introduced:
   1. Senior researcher office hours, where senior researchers will have informal discussions with the conference attendees and answer questions in a cozy environment; 
   2. Deep learning Indaba X Rwanda is co-located with ICLR 2023 on May 4th. The gathering works towards the vision of Africans becoming critical contributors, owners, and shapers of future advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
   3. Kaggle@ICLR Workshops Kaggle, in partnership with Zindi, is hosting this workshop targeting early-career data scientists and junior researchers from underrepresented backgrounds to work on applied machine learning projects, with a focus on using AI to solve societal challenges in Africa. It will include a hackathon during the conference to engage participants in a live ML challenge and promote mentorship connections.  
   4. Tiny paper @ DEI workshops now calling for 2-page tiny papers to create more pathways for people from various backgrounds to enter, stay, and grow in the deep learning community.
   5. Journal showcase attracts authors with journal papers in JMLR and other top machine learning journals to present their work at ICLR 2023. 
   6. Blogpost track with poster presentations, is where accepted blog posts will be presented as posters. 

Figure 1. Program Overview of In-person Conference 

Virtual Conference 

The virtual conference program consists of the following contents:

• Recorded videos of paper presentations: similar to previous years, all recorded videos of paper presentations will be available on virtual conference sites for asynchronous viewing. Robotchat is available to allow remote attendees to ask questions aboutpapers.
• Live streaming of keynote talks: All keynotes and oral presentations of selected papers will be held in person, but live-streamed for virtual participation. 
• Workshops: There are 5 fully-virtual workshops and over 10 hybrid workshops held across varying time zones.
• Socials: affinity group meetings and socials will be held during the virtual week. Check the agenda for the different times.  

Registration While we are very proud to host the first major AI conference in Africa, ICLR 2023 does cost drastically more due to: 

1. price hike in food, lodging, travel, personnel, livestream services, childcare services, insurance, etc, 
2.  a significant decrease in the number of on-site participants due to the venue limits, 
3. significant decrease in sponsorship, and 
4.  limited reserve of funding due to lower registration for a virtual conference  

In order to maintain a high-quality experience for attendees (e.g., besides the typical service, we also have lunch for all in-person attendees, childcare services as well as meals for children), we have made the following changes to registrations: 

All accepted papers are required to have at least one author with in-person registration (student or regular) or regular virtual registration. The main part of the cost will be used to cover the fee charged by slidelive and virtual conference sites for video hosting services and livestream services. Single-day workshop registrations are available to workshop attendees. 

Getting ready to travel – VISA and vaccines. 

Book flights as soon as possible. If you are attending the conference, book your flight as soon as possible and register.  

VISA and vaccines: detailed information about VISA and vaccines can be found at https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2023/VisaTravel. 

Childcare: ICLR 2023 is proud to provide childcare for attendees through KiddieCorp. Details can be found at https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2023/ChildCare. Different from previous conferences, meals will be provided. However, if there are any special dietary needs beyond what is provided, parents will be responsible for bringing additional snacks or meals for their child. 

Health, Security and Safety. While we are excited about getting back in person, concerns due to COVID  and other unforeseeable events remain. We will continuously monitor the situation and will update our safety approach and policies.

ICLR has taken extra actions to ensure the security and safety of our attendees. As usual, attendees are advised to take extra caution while traveling in a foreign country and will ultimately be responsible for their own safety. See Kigali travel tips at https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2023/VisitKigali. 

The organizing committees are working hard to provide the best experience for attendees at ICLR 2023. We thank them deeply for their commitment to our research community.  

We look forward to seeing you in May!