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 member of the ELLIS Society, and a faculty affiliate of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. Chris previously held a senior research scientist position at Google DeepMind and a membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. 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 works on the methodology of machine learning with the goal of designing algorithms that can learn to make good predictions in stubbornly complex settings like medicine or drug discovery. 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.