Companies appear in 23% of classified AI conference chair roles in 2026
Data as of
- Chair roles
- 578
- Matched chairs
- 231
- Company share, 2026
- 23%
Who runs the main AI conferences? We collected general and program chair lists for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR and ACL. In 2026, we estimate that 23% of roles with a classified source affiliation list a company (7 of 31). These roles help set the conference program and organize the meeting.
Key findings
- Across 578 recorded chair roles, 451 have a historical source affiliation that we can classify. Companies appear in 29% of these roles.
- Across the shared coverage period, the company share is 20% in 2013–2016 and 26% in 2025–2026.
- Yoshua Bengio has the most high-confidence matched chair roles, with 8. We identify 14 people who chaired more than one of these conferences.
The affiliation on the committee page
We use the affiliation listed by the conference. Historical copies matter because some committee sites now show the person's current employer. We exclude 5 chair roles with only a current-profile affiliation from the affiliation analysis. A joint university and company appointment counts once in the company group.
Stacked bars show university, company and institute shares for 4 periods. The final period covers 2025–2026.
Source: conference committee pages, archived conference sites and proceedings front matter, collected 24 October 2026. General and program chair roles only. A role with any listed company affiliation counts in Company, including joint appointments. University covers the remaining university affiliations. Institute covers the remaining research institutes and labs. Missing, unclassified and current-profile-only affiliations are excluded from the shares. The final period may be shorter.
Data table
| Period or conference | Recorded roles | University | Company | Institute | Unclassified or no historical affiliation | Company share of classified roles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013–2016 | 89 | 63 | 16 | 2 | 8 | 19.8% |
| 2017–2020 | 96 | 51 | 36 | 2 | 7 | 40.4% |
| 2021–2024 | 116 | 65 | 42 | 9 | 0 | 36.2% |
| 2025–2026 | 63 | 38 | 15 | 5 | 5 | 25.9% |
The time comparison starts in 2013, when all 5 conferences have source coverage for both chair roles in every year through 2026. Each role has equal weight. Conferences with larger chair teams contribute more roles. Changes can reflect the conference mix, the choice of chairs and the affiliations listed for them.
The latest chair teams
In 2026, ICLR has the highest company share among classified chair roles, at 50%. Across all conferences, 22 roles list a university without a company, 7 list a company, and 2 list an institute or lab.
Stacked bars compare the affiliation mix at 5 conferences in 2026. Counts and shares appear in the data table.
Source: conference committee pages, archived conference sites and proceedings front matter, collected 24 October 2026. General and program chair roles only. A role with any listed company affiliation counts in Company, including joint appointments. University covers the remaining university affiliations. Institute covers the remaining research institutes and labs. Missing, unclassified and current-profile-only affiliations are excluded from the shares.
Data table
| Period or conference | Recorded roles | University | Company | Institute | Unclassified or no historical affiliation | Company share of classified roles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NeurIPS | 7 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 28.6% |
| ICML | 5 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 40% |
| ICLR | 6 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 50% |
| CVPR | 8 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| ACL | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
People who return to the chair role
We match 332 chair roles to 231 people with high confidence. A name match also needs supporting affiliation or biography evidence. The ranking covers those matches. Its counts depend on the years and roles for which we have sources.
Bars rank 6 people by their recorded chair roles. Each name has an independently supported match to a profile.
Source: conference committee pages, archived conference sites and proceedings front matter, collected 24 October 2026. General and program chair roles only. Only high-confidence profile matches count. Coverage differs by conference and year.
Data table
| Person | General chair | Program chair | Conference and year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yoshua Bengio | 7 | 1 | NeurIPS: 2008–2009 and ICLR: 2013–2018 |
| Hugo Larochelle | 1 | 5 | NeurIPS: 2018–2020 and ICLR: 2015–2017 |
| Yann LeCun | 6 | 0 | ICLR: 2013–2018 |
| Marc'Aurelio Ranzato | 1 | 3 | NeurIPS: 2020–2021 and ICLR: 2017–2018 |
| Samy Bengio | 1 | 3 | NeurIPS: 2017–2018 and ICLR: 2015–2016 |
| Shakir Mohamed | 2 | 2 | NeurIPS: 2022 and ICLR: 2019–2021 |
The affiliations that appear most
Microsoft Research appears on 15 chair roles under the same source label. We keep spelling variants and joint appointments separate in this comparison. A company's research lab can therefore have its own label.
Bars show 8 source affiliation labels. Spelling variants and joint affiliations remain separate.
Source: conference committee pages, archived conference sites and proceedings front matter, collected 24 October 2026. General and program chair roles only. Counts use the exact listed affiliation. Spelling variants, renamed labs and joint affiliations remain separate. Current-profile-only affiliations are excluded.
Data table
| Listed affiliation | Chair roles | Example source |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Research | 15 | Committee source |
| Carnegie Mellon University | 10 | Committee source |
| 9 | Committee source | |
| Stanford University | 9 | Committee source |
| DeepMind | 6 | Committee source |
| Google Brain | 6 | Committee source |
| Google Research | 6 | Committee source |
| University of Pennsylvania | 6 | Committee source |
Source coverage
Each row counts a person, conference, year and role. A person with both chair roles in the same year counts twice. The table lists only years with source records for that role. Gaps remain missing data. We exclude 23 announced roles after 2026.
| Conference | General chair years | Program chair years | Senior area chair years |
|---|---|---|---|
| NeurIPS | 2003–2026 | 2003–2026 | 2017, 2019–2025 |
| ICML | 1996, 1998, 2007–2026 | 2003, 2007–2026 | No source records |
| ICLR | 2013–2026 | 2013–2026 | 2022–2026 |
| CVPR | 1983, 1985–1986, 1988–1989, 1991–1994, 1996–2001, 2003–2026 | 1983, 1985–1986, 1988–1989, 1991–1994, 1996–2001, 2003–2026 | No source records |
| ACL | 1980, 2000–2026 | 1979–1983, 1985–2026 | 2022–2025 |
Senior area chair lists contain 1,480 additional recorded roles. Their coverage starts later and differs between conferences. Many lists omit affiliations. We leave these roles out of the chair rankings and affiliation shares above. They provide no estimate of the total number of organizers.
Method note: A role with any listed company affiliation counts in Company, including joint appointments. University covers the remaining university affiliations. Institute covers the remaining research institutes and labs. Missing, unclassified and current-profile-only affiliations are excluded from the shares. Counts come from the committee sources collected on 24 October 2026. Source links appear in the affiliation chart's data table.
Career data comes from the biographies on this site and from OpenAlex author records, as of 24 October 2026. People whose OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mixed are left out of citation figures.