Sydney will host the world’s largest artificial intelligence and machine learning conference for the first time in November 2021.

More than 8,000 attendees are expected at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) at the International Convention Centre Sydney. They will include researchers and technology experts from around the globe.

It will be the third time in the event’s 35-year history that it has been held outside North America – and the first time it has been held in the Asia Pacific region.

The CSIRO’s data organisation, Data61, led Australia’s bid to host the event. Australia's local machine learning community was a factor in winning the hosting rights, according to Dr Richard Nock, head of the machine learning research group at Data61.

“This past year, our researchers have applied AI and machine learning to assist in diagnosing complex mental health disorders , detect disease outbreaks and ‘vaccinate’ algorithms against adversarial attacks,” Dr Nock stated.

Ethical design and deployment of machine learning is one of the issues Dr Nock expects will be discussed at the event.

NeurIPS is organised by the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, which aims to “foster insights into solving difficult problems by bringing together researchers from biological, psychological, technological, mathematical, and theoretical areas of science and engineering.”