PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Iain Murray

Iain Murray holds a personal chair in machine learning and inference at the University of Edinburgh and is an ELLIS Fellow at the Edinburgh unit. He completed his PhD at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL in 2007, and a Commonwealth fellowship in Toronto came before his move to Edinburgh in 2010. His elliptical slice sampling, a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, appeared at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics in 2010. Later papers he co-wrote, MADE in 2015 and masked autoregressive flow in 2017, address distribution and density estimation. He was publications chair for ICML in 2017 and 2018, program chair for ICLR in 2018, and the first Amazon Scholar in Europe from 2018 to 2024.

Works
97
Citations
12,716
h-index
37

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    A Gatsby doctorate

    He completes his PhD at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, under Zoubin Ghahramani, in 2007.

  2. By 2010

    Toronto, then Edinburgh

    He works as a Commonwealth fellow in machine learning at the University of Toronto, before he moves to Edinburgh in 2010.

  3. 2010

    Elliptical slice sampling

    Elliptical slice sampling, a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, appears at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics in 2010. Ryan Adams and David MacKay are his co-authors.

  4. 2015

    MADE, a masked autoencoder

    He co-writes MADE, a masked autoencoder for distribution estimation, with Mathieu Germain, Karol Gregor, and Hugo Larochelle. The paper appears in the proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning in 2015.

  5. 2017

    Masked autoregressive flow

    With George Papamakarios and Theo Pavlakou, he writes Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation, which appears at NIPS in 2017.

  6. 2017–2018

    Chairing ICML and ICLR

    He takes on publications chair for ICML in 2017 and 2018, and program chair for ICLR in 2018.

  7. 2018–2024

    The first Amazon Scholar in Europe

    The Amazon Scholar role, the first appointed in Europe, runs from 2018 to 2024.

  8. As of October 2026

    A personal chair at Edinburgh

    He holds a personal chair in machine learning and inference at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He is also an ELLIS Fellow at the Edinburgh unit.

Sources and credits

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  1. Iain Murray - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer research.ed.ac.uk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Elliptical slice sampling proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. [1001.0175] Elliptical slice sampling arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. MADE: Masked Autoencoder for Distribution Estimation proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation papers.nips.cc. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. Iain Murray biography homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Iain Murray | School of Informatics | School of Informatics inf.ed.ac.uk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. Iain Murray | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems ellis.eu. Checked 15 October 2026.