I've actually organized a machine learning conference in Iceland (AISTATS and MLSS 2014), and I can probably shed some light on this.

One, it's hideously expensive now, for almost anyone in the world. Second, it's incredibly small -- 320,000 people in the entire country, and maybe 220,000 of those in the Reykjavik area. Due to the "big fish in a small pond" aspect of Reykjavik being the capital, there's more infrastructure than you'd expect from a city of 200,000 people, but not that much more.

NIPS draws something like 3500 attendees now. I'm not sure there are 3500 hotel rooms in the country of Iceland. I struggled to find a venue that could host 10% of that for AISTATS. AISTATS is single-track which requires one big room, but there would have been very few options for finding a room big enough for just the deep learning breakaways at NIPS.

Aside from that, it's great. We did draw more people from the US than typical AISTATS European years had done, and it's a beautiful country for visitors to enjoy. But I don't think it's capable of becoming a major world conference center at the moment.

Fantastic response and insights. Thanks!

The next most important start-up hub after SF is Beijing. It's much more affordable than SF, but there are other concerns with hosting conferences there such as pollution, speech and media controls and a lot of regulation in general.

edit: I had no idea there was so much China hate here. I'm no fan of certain policies of the government, believe me. I hate the GFW with a passion. But the entrepreneurial community is incredible. There's a lot of skill at the high end and awe-inspiring levels of fearlessness and ambition.

I've been to a conference in mainland China. The firewall made it completely miserable (it was a tech conference). People from the west expect to be able to use Google/gmail/hangouts/github/ssh for more than 5 minute random bursts of connectivity.

You can't expect people to go to tech conferences in those garbage conditions.

DevCon2? Lots of people on /r/ethereum were upset that videos of the talks were not available for weeks afterwards because it was in Shanghai.

No, it was for developing infrastructure tooling (e.g. K8s, docker, etc), all of which was mainly hosted on github.

Sounds like it's not an uncommon problem. Frankly I think the conferences are only as successful as they are because of the volume of mainland Chinese citizens and the novelty of a trip to mainland China for people outside of the country.

That would be great for conferences if it wasn't for everything you mentioned plus high levels of govt corruption and IP theft. The lack of open Internet alone is enough that the vast majority of conferences simply cannot be held there.

It's not "China hate" when there's legitimate reasons.

In what way is Beijing a legitimate counterpoint to an American lurch toward despotism?

..like being able to use unfiltered internet?

pollution?

That only mods are 'dang and 'sctb. Are you referring to them? Or do you mean members who are downvoting? If the latter, please don't refer to them as mods.

And regardless, kindly don't resort to name calling.

Like the 20+ hours of travel to get there?

From where does it take 20 hours to get to Beijing? SFO to Beijing is just over half that.

You're already on the Pacific coast. Not everyone on the planet is.

Under optimal circumstances, not including airport time which can be considerable, flight time between New York and Shanghai is 15 hours.

Add in a few hours to check-in, clear customs, plus other nonsense and you're up to 18. Under ideal circumstances.

I'm not sure what Shanghai has to do with a discussion about travel time to Beijing. New York to Beijing is about 13-13.5 hours.

You claimed 20 hours. I'm asked 'from where' and you weren't able to answer.

I'm not suggesting Beijing is the ideal conference location, even though I live there, but there's no need to spread FUD about how it can take such a long time for a developer to reach there.

Oh, and it takes me the same time to get to SF as it takes an SF-based developer to get to Beijing. Hotels are cheaper in Beijing. Salaries are higher in SF.

A lot more people on the planet live near Beijing than near Iceland.

If you're talking about India and China, sure.

If you're talking about America and Europe? Nope.

Yes, India and China are indisputable giants but also consider Japan (still the #2 or #3 economy in the world depending on the metric), Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore—all advanced economies with extremely educated and technical populaces.

Then there's Vietnam, which is very poor but growing over 10% / year and highly educated despite the poverty. There are also hundreds of millions of people in Indonesia and Malaysia.

I was speaking not of the US or Europe but the world in general. We don't live in the Eurocentric world of 150 years ago. The center of gravity now spans the Pacific.

It will. It does not right now if you're talking about conferences. Participants are still largely from the Americas and Europe.

Also this entire argument is utterly absurd. If you're upset about brutal domestic policies the last place you should be arguing in favor of is China.

China has very sane, good government, come actually experience it and stop believing CIA lies. The firewall is a rational way to keep the US deep state out.

While I'll grant you Chinese government officials are probably more educated and experienced than your average American ones, there is no justifying the pervasive political censorship in China.

The CIA is not responsible for suppressing the Tiananmen Square incident. Stop spreading bullshit.

While the idea of Iceland is great, being in the middle of the Atlantic. But this means that it's close to no one, including likely conference organizers.

Iceland is only a four-hour flight from Boston or Berlin. It's really quite a convenient location.

While it is a great location, Iceland is not "cheap for a Nordic country" anymore. They picked up, and isolation does not come for free.