(Yicai) March 27 — The China Science and Technology Association has accused the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, an annual global machine learning and computational neuroscience event, of politicizing academic issues and excluding multiple participants, including Chinese institutions, based on the United States’ unilateral sanctions list.
NeurIPS organizers’ move “brings political hegemony into academic exchanges, blatantly tramples on the rules of cooperation that academic communities have followed for hundreds of years, seriously distorts academic impartiality, pollutes the academic ecosystem, and seriously impedes scientific progress,” CAST said yesterday. No matter how prestigious an academic conference may be, once it is contaminated by political sycophancy, it will be looked down upon by the academic community, the report added.
Sponsored by the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, NeurIPS is the top academic and industrial conference in the field of AI and will be held in Sydney in December. U.S. organizers recently updated their rules for contributors, banning contributions from entities on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, including approximately 873 Chinese entities.
CAST pointed out that science is a common property of humanity and open cooperation is the only way to promote scientific development. All scholars and academic organizations that uphold justice and pursue truth should jointly take responsibility to resist backlash and turbulence, protect the independence and purity of academic research, and maintain an open, trusting and cooperative international academic environment, the report said.
CAST stressed that there is nothing to prevent China’s science and technology stakeholders from climbing the science summit, nor any obstacles that can shatter China’s strong confidence in achieving self-reliance through advanced science and technology and firm determination to build a community with a shared future for mankind.
Editor: Martin Kadyev
