(Yicai) March 27 -- The China Association for Science and Technology has condemned the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, a global machine learning and computational neuroscience annual event, for politicizing academic affairs and excluding several contributors, including Chinese institutions, based on a unilateral sanctions list of the United States.

The move by NeurIPS' host "introduces political hegemony into academic exchanges, blatantly tramples on the cooperative rules that the academic community has adhered to for hundreds of years, seriously distorts academic fairness, pollutes the academic ecosystem, and seriously hinders scientific progress," the CAST said yesterday. Any academic conference, no matter how well-known, will be despised by the academic community once tainted by political sycophancy, it added.

Hosted by Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, the NeurIPS is a top academic and industrial conference in the AI field, scheduled to be held in Sydney in December. The US host recently updated rules for contributors, prohibiting submissions from institutions on the US Department of the Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list, which includes about 873 Chinese entities.

Science is a commonwealth of humanity, and open cooperation is the only way to promote scientific development, the CAST noted. All scholars and academic organizations that uphold justice and pursue truth should take responsibility to jointly resist the countercurrent and turbid water, defend the independence and purity of academic research, and maintain an open, trustworthy, and cooperative international academic environment, it said.

No obstacles will stop Chinese scientific and technological workers from climbing the science summit or shatter China's strong confidence in achieving self-reliance in high-level sci-tech and its firm determination to build a community with a shared future for mankind, the CAST stressed.

Editor: Martin Kadiev