Christopher Pal is an Associate Professor at the École Polytechnique of Montreal. He is currently teaching Multimedia data processing and analysis in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering. He was a former professor at the University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science before arriving in Montreal. He was a research scientist in the University of Massachusetts and affiliated with the Interactive Visual Media Group and the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics groups at Microsoft Research. His research led to three patents on image processing, computer vision and interactive multimedia.
He earned his Master of Science in Math and PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He developed methods for automated cartography and the analysis of high-resolution digital aerial photography during his masters research. He was also involved with a group of software engineering projects developing spatial databases for managing environmental information. His PhD research led to contributions applying probability models and optimization techniques to image, video and signal processing.
During his PhD studies, he was also a research assistant at the University of Toronto in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He closely collaborated with the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research. He researched on image processing and statistical methods for the analysis of large scale genomics and computational molecular biology experiments using DNA microarrays. Before his graduate studies, he was with the multimedia research company Interval in Silicon Valley, California. He was awarded a patent on audio signal processing as a result of his research at Interval.
Christopher Pal is a faculty member at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), working alongside with leading world experts in machine learning and deep learning Prof. Yoshua Bengio, Prof. Aaron Courville, Prof. Pascal Vincent, Prof. Simon Lacoste-Julien, Prof. Laurent Charlin and Prof. Roland Memisevic. He is also a member of the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO).
