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 expen

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.