PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Laurent Charlin

Laurent Charlin is a machine learning researcher at HEC Montréal and Mila whose work covers recommender systems, dialogue systems and continual learning. With Richard Zemel, he co-developed the Toronto Paper Matching System, which recommends papers to conference reviewers and was adopted by more than 100 conferences. After a master's at Waterloo in 2006, a Toronto PhD and postdocs at Princeton, Columbia and McGill, he joined HEC Montréal in 2017 and became a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in 2019. From March 2025 until Hugo Larochelle's appointment in September 2025, he served as Mila's Interim Scientific Director. He is an associate professor at HEC Montréal, a core academic member of Mila, and, since January 2026, an editor-in-chief of Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Timeline

  1. 2006–2012

    Degrees at Waterloo and Toronto

    He completes a master's thesis on automated hierarchy discovery for planning in partially observable domains at the University of Waterloo's School of Computer Science in December 2006, advised by Pascal Poupart. He then earns a PhD in the machine learning group at the University of Toronto, advised by Richard Zemel and Craig Boutilier, and receives Toronto's Ray Reiter Graduate Award and Doctoral Completion Award in 2012.

  2. 2013

    The Toronto Paper Matching System

    In 2013, he and Richard Zemel present the Toronto Paper Matching System, an automated paper-reviewer assignment system, at the ICML Workshop on Peer Reviewing and Publishing Models. The system, which recommends and matches papers to reviewers, goes on to be adopted by more than 100 conferences.

  3. 2016–2017

    Papers on dialogue systems

    He coauthors a study of unsupervised evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation at EMNLP in 2016. In 2017, he coauthors "A Hierarchical Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Generating Dialogues" at AAAI with Iulian Vlad Serban, Yoshua Bengio and others. His publications on dialogue systems (chatbots) are highly cited.

  4. 2017

    Joining HEC Montréal

    After postdoctoral work at Princeton University and Columbia University with David Blei and at McGill University, he joins the faculty of HEC Montréal in 2017, first as an assistant professor in the Department of Decision Sciences. He receives a Google Focused Research Award in 2017.

  5. 2019–2024

    A Canada CIFAR AI Chair

    In April 2019, CIFAR names him one of six new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs, a five-year chair affiliated with Mila. The chair supports his work on personalized machine learning that adapts to users' tastes, including continual learning and recommender systems with better interaction. CIFAR renews the chair in 2024.

  6. 2020–2022

    Continual learning papers

    He coauthors "Online Fast Adaptation and Knowledge Accumulation: a New Approach to Continual Learning" at NeurIPS in 2020 and "Continual Learning via Local Module Composition" at NeurIPS in 2021. In 2022, he coauthors "Continual Learning with Foundation Models: An Empirical Study of Latent Replay" at CoLLAs and "Learning to Cut by Looking Ahead" at ICML.

  7. March 2025–September 2025

    Interim director of Mila

    In March 2025, Mila's Board of Directors appoints him Interim Scientific Director when Yoshua Bengio becomes Founder and Scientific Advisor. Hugo Larochelle succeeds him as Scientific Director in September 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor and journal editor

    He is an associate professor at HEC Montréal and a core academic member of Mila. In January 2026, he joins the editors-in-chief of Transactions on Machine Learning Research as Hugo Larochelle, the last founding editor-in-chief, completes his term.

Career

  1. Since 2017HEC MontréalAssistant professor
  2. NowMilaCore academic member
  3. Princeton UniversityPostdoctoral researcher
  4. Columbia UniversityPostdoctoral researcher
  5. McGill UniversityPostdoctoral researcher

Education

  1. 2012University of TorontoPhD
  2. 2006University of WaterlooMaster's degree

From the biography.

  1. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Mila. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  2. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Mila. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  3. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Mila. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Mila. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Laurent Charlin yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Laurent Charlin's home page cs.toronto.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Laurent Charlin – CIFAR cifar.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Laurent Charlin | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Laurent Charlin appointed Mila’s interim scientific director | HEC Montréal hec.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Laurent Charlin à la tête d’une chaire en intelligence artificielle Canada-CIFAR | HEC Montréal hec.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Transition in Mila's Scientific Direction: Yoshua Bengio Becomes Scientific Advisor and Laurent Charlin Appointed Interim Scientific Director | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. New era at Mila as Hugo Larochelle named scientific director | BetaKit betakit.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Transactions on Machine Learning Research jmlr.org. Checked 21 October 2026.