Christopher Bishop
Technical Fellow and Director, Microsoft Research AI for Science
About
Christopher Bishop is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and the Director of Microsoft Research AI for Science. (opens in new tab)
He is also Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. In 2004, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in 2007 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Chris was a founding member of the UK AI Council (opens in new tab), and in 2019 he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology (opens in new tab). Chris is a keen advocate of public engagement in science, and in 2008 he delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (opens in new tab), established in 1825 by Michael Faraday, and broadcast on national television.
Chris obtained a BA in Physics from Oxford, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on quantum field theory. After his PhD he joined the Theoretical Physics Division of Culham Laboratory where he conducted research into the physics of magnetically confined fusion plasmas. During this time, he developed an interest in machine learning and became Head of the Applied Neurocomputing Centre at AEA Technology. He was subsequently elected to a Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Aston University, where he set up and led the Neural Computing Research Group. He joined Microsoft in 1997 and was Lab Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge from 2015 until 2022 when he founded the new AI for Science team. At Microsoft Research, Chris oversees a global portfolio of research, focussed on machine learning for the natural sciences.
Chris is the author of the highly cited and widely adopted machine learning textbooks Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition (Oxford, 1995) and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Springer, 2006). He recently published a new textbook Deep Learning: Foundations and Concepts (opens in new tab), jointly with his son Hugh Bishop, which was recently confirmed as Springer-Nature’s top selling book of 2024.