First of all, this is a big start, led by two of the three giants of deep learning, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.
Yoshua Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and one of the three giants of deep learning. He led the artificial intelligence laboratory (MILA) of the University of Montreal to conduct academic research on artificial intelligence technology. MILA is one of the largest artificial intelligence research centers in the world and has close cooperation with Google.
Needless to say, Yann LeCun, one of the three giants of deep learning, is currently the president of the Facebook Institute of Artificial Intelligence (FAIR) and a professor at new york University. As the father of convolutional neural network, he has made important contributions to the development and innovation of deep learning.
As for the reasons for the establishment of ICLR, Lei Feng. Com tries to guess a thing or two from the open letter published by Bengio and Lecun in ICLR First official website.