NIPS was founded in 1987 by Ed Posner and Yaser Abu-Mostafa, not by Terry Sejnowski — Sejnowski was an invited first-year speaker who went on to organize NIPS 1988

The NIPS (now NeurIPS) conference was founded in 1987 by Ed Posner, as founding general chairman, and Yaser Abu-Mostafa, as founding program chairman — by Abu-Mostafa's own account, on his Caltech faculty page: "the founding program chairman of NIPS/NeurIPS in 1987, with the late Ed Posner as the founding general chairman."

Terry Sejnowski, lead author of NETtalk (claim-nettalk-1987-complex-systems-distinct-from-1986-report), was not among the founders. He was one of the invited speakers at the inaugural 1987 conference and was subsequently asked to organize the 1988 meeting — a founding-era role, but distinct from having founded the conference himself. This is worth recording because the more economical, more obvious-seeming story — that NETtalk's author founded the conference whose proceedings Yann LeCun later freely released via DjVu (claim-djvu-created-to-freely-distribute-scanned-documents) — turns out to be wrong. The actual connection between NETtalk and the DjVu-freed NIPS archive runs through Sejnowski's presence as a participant, not through institutional founding: his own 1987 NIPS backgammon paper (Tesauro & Sejnowski) sits in the earliest freed proceedings volume, while NETtalk itself, published in Complex Systems, does not.