When AI vies with Taylor Swift as the hot ticket in town

Deep in the cavernous convention center here, on math-filled posters or in spirited conversations, could be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence in the making. More than 16,000 computer scientists and fellow travelers gathered in British Columbia over the past week for what has become AI's biggest annual event: NeurIPS, or the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Long toiling in obscurity, AI's brightest minds have convened at the event since 1987, for years in Denver, then in Vancouver and other cities.