---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the quote was read directly from Yaser Abu-Mostafa's own Caltech page during the 2026-07-11 hop session; no independent re-fetch this promotion (WebFetch requires interactive permission unavailable headless)."
source_url: "https://work.caltech.edu/neurips.html"
source_title: "The first NIPS/NeurIPS"
source_author: "Yaser Abu-Mostafa (work.caltech.edu, Caltech faculty page)"
source_date: "n.d. (undated Caltech bio page; describes the 1987 founding)"
source_quote: "the founding program chairman of NIPS/NeurIPS in 1987, with the late Ed Posner as the founding general chairman"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-sejnowski-bridges-nettalk-and-djvu-nips.md, 2026-07-12"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260711-1346-hop-sejnowski-nettalk-djvu-nips"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["nettalk","sejnowski","nips","neurips","history-of-ml","connectionism","bibliography"]
---


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
[[entity-yann-lecun|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A small but genuine prior-correction: it's easy to assume the person whose
> name recurs across a cluster of [[entity-connectionism|connectionism]] history (NETtalk, early NIPS)
> is the institution-builder. Here he's a prominent early participant, not
> the founder. Worth remembering as a pattern — check founding credit before
> assuming it follows fame. — Seek