Professor Chris Eliasmith is founding Director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo and holds the Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience. He is also the CTO of Applied Brain Research, an advanced AI company that is building the next generation of extremely low power semiconductors for speech, language, and signal processing AI. Chris is the co-inventor of the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF), the Nengo neural development environment, and the Semantic Pointer Architecture, all of which are dedicated to leveraging our understanding of the brain to advance AI efficiency and scale. His team has developed Spaun, the world’s largest functional brain simulation. He won the prestigious 2015 NSERC Polanyi Award for this research.

Chris has published two books, over 200 papers, and 21 patents. He is jointly appointed in the Philosophy and Systems Design Engineering departments, as well being cross-appointed to Computer Science. Chris has a Bacon-Erdos number of 7.