PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Chris J. Maddison

Also known as Chris Maddison

As of October 2026, Chris Maddison is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and a Canada CIFAR Chair in AI at the Vector Institute. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science at Toronto and completed doctoral research at Oxford. With DeepMind colleagues, he helped develop AlphaGo and coauthored a Nature study of its Go-playing system. A* Sampling won the NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award in 2014, and Oops I Took A Gradient received an ICML 2021 Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention. In 2026, Schmidt Sciences named him an AI2050 Early Career Fellow, and his research focuses on machine-learning methods for prediction in fields such as medicine and drug discovery.

Works
86
Citations
18,031
h-index
15

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2014

    An award for A* Sampling

    In 2014, A* Sampling, which he coauthors with Daniel Tarlow and Tom Minka, receives the NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award.

  2. 2015–2016

    AlphaGo and a Nature study

    With DeepMind colleagues, he helps develop AlphaGo; the program defeats a world champion in Go in 2015. In 2016, he coauthors a Nature study on the system's performance against other Go programs.

  3. By 2019

    Toronto and Oxford education

    By 2019, he holds undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science from U of T and completes doctoral research at Oxford.

  4. 2019

    A CIFAR AI Chair

    In 2019, he joins the latest cohort of CIFAR AI Chairs.

  5. 2020

    Joining U of T

    In 2020, he joins U of T as an assistant professor in computer science and statistical sciences after serving as a senior research scientist at DeepMind.

  6. 2021

    Sampling discrete distributions

    In 2021, he coauthors Oops I Took A Gradient, a scalable sampler that uses likelihood gradients to propose Metropolis-Hastings updates for discrete probabilistic models; ICML gives the paper an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention.

  7. 2026

    An AI2050 fellowship

    In 2026, Schmidt Sciences names him an AI2050 Early Career Fellow.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Toronto

    As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor cross-appointed to computer science and statistical sciences at the University of Toronto and a Canada CIFAR Chair in AI at the Vector Institute. He researches machine-learning methods for prediction in complex settings such as medicine and drug discovery.

Sources and credits

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  1. Chris J. Maddison cs.toronto.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. U of T, Vector Institute woo rising stars in machine learning field utoronto.ca. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo: meet the U of T computer scientists who helped it win utoronto.ca. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. Eight U of T artificial intelligence researchers named CIFAR AI Chairs utoronto.ca. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Chris Maddison awarded AI2050 fellowship to address data scarcity in drug discovery web.cs.toronto.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. Oops I Took A Gradient: Scalable Sampling for Discrete Distributions arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2021 Awards icml.cc. Checked 15 October 2026.