Chris Maddison

Chris Maddison is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto. He is a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, a research scientist at DeepMind, a member of the ELLIS Society, and a faculty affiliate of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Maddison works on the methodology of statistical machine learning, with an emphasis on methods that work at scale in deep learning applications. His research interests lie in the study of Bayesian inference, optimization, discrete search. Previously, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ from 2019–2020, and he completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. Maddison was an Open Philanthropy AI Fellow during his graduate studies. He received a NeurIPS Best Paper Award in 2014. He was a founding member of the AlphaGo project, which received the IJCAI Marvin Minsky Medal for Outstanding Achievements in AI in 2018.

Chris is interested in improving how we represent discrete objects, like molecules and proteins, in order to accelerate applications in drug discovery and optimization.