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
Invited Speakers 2012
- Michael Jordan
- Yishay Mansour
- Ralf Herbrich
- Sanjeev Arora
- Yann LeCun
Invited Speakers 2012
- Andrew Ng
- Arkadi Nemirovski
- Dimitris Achlioptas
Invited Speakers 2011
Invited Speakers 2010
Invited Speakers 2009
Invited Speakers 2008
Invited SPeakers 2006
Invited Speakers 2005
Invited Speakers 2004
- William T. Freeman
- David J. Hand
Invited Speakers 2010
- Noga Alon
- Naom Nisan
Invited Speakers 2009
- Piotr Indyk
- Adam Tauman Kalai,
Invited Speakers 2008
- Peter Grünwald
- Robin Hanson
- Dan Klein
- Gabor Lugosi
- Dana Ron
- Santosh Vempala
Invited SPeakers 2006
- Luc Devroye
- Gyorgy Turán
- Vladimir Vovk
Invited Speakers 2005
- Sergiu Hart
- Satinder Singh
Invited Speakers 2004
- Michael Kearns
- Stephen Boyd
- Moses Charikar
Which women should they invite? Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, the top 1% of machine learning researchers is almost entirely men?
ReplyDeleteYou 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.