Monday, July 06, 2015

The Association of Computational Learning Only Invites Men to Speak at their Annual Meetings 2004-2015.

I have been pointed to a meeting series by a colleague.  The meeting is the "Conference on Learning Theory" brought to use by the The Association of Computational Learning.

Since 2004 they have had 31 Invited Speakers at their annual meeting.  30 of which have been men.  That comes to 97% men.  3% women.  Worst I have ever seen I think.



UPDATE 2:45 PM.  Note - I am not trying to target the speakers here.  They were not the ones who planned these meetings.  They were just the invited speakers who, over the years, happened to be almost all men.  It is the organizers of the meeting who need to be questioned about this ...  Some of these speakers may very well be dead against having a series with so few female speakers.

The list of Sponsors for their most recent meeting includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo.  Time to pressure those companies and the other sponsors to drop sponsorship for this organization and their meeting.



UPDATE #2 4:00 PM.  I have been told that there are active efforts underway by some members of the community to fix the underrepresentation of women as invited speakers in this meeting series. Stay tuned.  
Here is the breakdown of speakers over the years.


Invited Speakers for 2015

Invited Speakers 2014
  • Michael Jordan 
  • Yishay Mansour Yishay Mansour
Invited Speakers 2013

  • Ralf Herbrich 
  • Sanjeev Arora 
  • Yann LeCun 



Invited Speakers 2012
  • Andrew Ng
  • Arkadi Nemirovski
  • Dimitris Achlioptas
Invited Speakers 2011


  • William T. Freeman Freeman
  • David  J. Hand Hand


Invited Speakers 2010


  • Noga Alon
  • Naom Nisan

Invited Speakers 2009

  • Piotr Indyk my picture
  • Adam Tauman Kalai, Adam Kalai


Invited Speakers 2008

  • Peter GrünwaldPhoto
  • Robin Hanson Photo
  • Dan Klein Photo
  • Gabor Lugosi Photo

  • Dana Ron 
  • Santosh Vempala 

Invited SPeakers 2006

  • Luc Devroye 
  • Gyorgy TuránPhoto of Gyorgy Turan
  • Vladimir VovkVovk's photo


Invited Speakers 2005

  • Sergiu Hart 
  • Satinder Singh

Invited Speakers 2004
  • Michael Kearns[PHOTO]
  • Stephen BoydStephen Boyd photo
  • Moses Charikar

1 comment:

  1. Which women should they invite? Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, the top 1% of machine learning researchers is almost entirely men?

    You can argue that that's a bad thing, but it's nonsense to pressure sponsors to drop the meeting because of the sex ratio, with no context.

    ReplyDelete

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