NeurIPS x Appen: Happy Hour on the Harbour

AboutThe best conversations at NeurIPS rarely happen at the poster sessions. They happen after.

Join researchers and engineers from frontier AI labs, fast-moving neolabs and top academic groups for an evening by the water in Darling Harbour. The people in the room build the models, agents, benchmarks and evals everyone else is reading about this week.

When: Wednesday 9 December 2026, 6:00 – 9:00 PM AEDTWhere: Venue revealed on approval (about an 8-minute walk from ICC Sydney)Registration: Approval required. Space is limited.

There are no talks and no slides, just drinks, food, a harbour view and a chance to meet the people behind the papers you've been citing.

We're your local hosts. Appen started in Sydney almost 30 years ago, and it's still home for us. We're glad to welcome NeurIPS to our city.

Who you'll meet

Researchers from frontier AI labs and neolabs

Academics working on agents, reasoning, evaluation and post-training

Engineers building training and evaluation pipelines at scale

The Appen research and delivery teams

What to expect

Drinks and food from 6:00 PM

A reserved waterfront area just for our guests

A short walk from ICC Sydney, so you can come straight from the conference

About Appen

Appen builds human data for frontier AI, with 30 years in the industry. Today, we work with most of the world's top LLM builders. Our data products cover Frontier Alignment (reasoning traces, SME RLHF, SFT and red teaming), Agentic AI (golden trajectories, RL environment design, failure-mode taxonomy and deep evaluation), Multimodal and Speech AI, Physical AI, Model Integrity (hallucination benchmarking and bias audits) and Research Services (calibrated LLM-as-a-judge and custom benchmarking). Our off-the-shelf catalog holds 646 datasets in nine categories, including RL tasks and verifiers, each with a spec sheet covering source, consent, annotation method and known limitations.