Hierarchical probabilistic models, Bayesian inference, Machine Learning

Iain Murray is a Professor of Machine Learning and Infernce at the University of Edinburgh. He moved into Machine Learning from Physics after taking David MacKay’s undergraduate course in Cambridge. He obtained his PhD in 2007 from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, under Zoubin Ghahramani. He was a commonwealth fellow in Machine Learning at the University of Toronto, before moving to Edinburgh in 2010. His research interests include building flexible probabilistic models of data, that can be applied widely: for example, to cosmology, images, neuroscience, perception, speech, sports, and text. Iain has developed several Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and neural methods for performing inference in these models.

Iain has been a program chair for ICLR (2018), publications chair for ICML (2017, 2018), and an area chair several times for AISTATS, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, and UAI. In 2018 he became the first Amazon Scholar in Europe.