Chris Maddison

Chris J. Maddison

Faculty Member

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto

Assistant Professor, Department of Statistical Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto

Canada CIFAR Artificial Intelligence Chair

The success of large language models is driven by the abundance and natural structure of data. What does this tell us about our universe and ourselves? How can we use these insights to advance applications in critical fields like drug discovery? Chris asks questions like these and is interested in building machine learning systems that learn in stubbornly complex settings relevant to medicine. He received the Corcoran Memorial Prize for his Oxford thesis and has received a number of paper awards at the top machine learning conferences. Chris is known for his gradient estimation techniques, which are now standard tools in the deep learning toolbox, and for his role as a founding member of the AlphaGo project, which was the first computer program to defeat a world champion in the game of Go.

Research Interests

  • Scaling laws
  • Machine learning
  • AI in drug discovery

Highlights

  • Open Philanthropy AI Fellow 2018
  • NIPS Best Paper Award in 2014
  • Founding members of the AlphaGo project
  • Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention, ICML 2021
  • Corcoran Memorial Prize (Thesis Award), Dept. of Statistics, Oxford 2020
  • IJCAI Marvin Minsky Medal for Outstanding Achievements in AI 2018
  • Breakthrough of the Year runner-up, Science 2016
  • Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Grand Prix  2016

Publications

The machine learning for combinatorial optimization competition (ml4co): Results and insights

Maxime Gasse and Simon Bowly and Quentin Cappart and Jonas Charfreitag and Laurent Charlin and Didier Chételat and Antonia Chmiela and Justin Dumouchelle and Ambros Gleixner and Aleksandr M Kazachkov and Elias Khalil and Pawel Lichocki and Andrea Lodi and Miles Lubin and Chris J Maddison and Morris Christopher and Dimitri J Papageorgiou and Augustin Parjadis and Sebastian Pokutta and Antoine Prouvost and Lara Scavuzzo and Giulia Zarpellon and Linxin Yang and Sha Lai and Akang Wang and Xiaodong Luo and Xiang Zhou and Haohan Huang and Shengcheng Shao and Yuanming Zhu and Dong Zhang and Tao Quan and Zixuan Cao and Yang Xu and Zhewei Huang and Shuchang Zhou and Chen Binbin and He Minggui and Hao Hao and Zhang Zhiyu and An Zhiwu and Mao Kun

2022