Prof Thore Graepel

Thore Graepel is a research group lead at DeepMind and holds a part-time position as Chair of Machine Learning at University College London. He studied physics at the University of Hamburg, Imperial College London, and Technical University of Berlin, where he also obtained his PhD in machine learning in 2001. He held post-doctoral positions at ETH Zurich and Royal Holloway College, University of London, before joining Microsoft Research in Cambridge in 2003, where he co-founded the Online Services and Advertising group. Major applications of Thore’s work include Xbox Live’s TrueSkill system for ranking and matchmaking, the AdPredictor framework for click-through rate prediction in Bing, and the Matchbox recommender system which inspired the recommendation engine of Xbox Live Marketplace. 

Thore’s research interests are in artificial intelligence and machine learning and include probabilistic graphical models, reinforcement learning, game theory, and multi-agent systems. He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed papers, is a named co-inventor on dozens of patents, serves on the editorial boards of JMLR and MLJ, and is a founding editor of the book series Machine Learning & Pattern Recognition at Chapman & Hall/CRC. 

At DeepMind, Thore has returned to his original passion of understanding and creating intelligence, and contributed to creating AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away. Thore has extensive experience in technical AI research and ethical publication practices and is part of a cross-functional group of DeepMind team members who come together to review research proposals and assess potential downstream impacts.