I think you're misunderstanding the role of "neural networks" in academia. NIPS has a lot of value to the machine learning and AI communities but, beyond vague inspiration, it has almost no connections to neuroscience. There is a substantial body of work in computational modeling of neuronal behavior, but this stuff is much messier (PDEs with biologically determined constants) and limited in scope than the papers that appear at NIPS.
edit: Relevant conferences in computational neuroscience -
edit: Relevant conferences in computational neuroscience -
* http://cosyne.org/c/index.php?title=Cosyne_09
* http://www.cnsorg.org/2009/
* http://icms.org.uk/workshops/mathneuro2009