• 13 May
  14:00 13th May 2016 ( Trinity Term 2016 )

  Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building

Speaker bio

Professor Shimon Whiteson studied English and Computer Science at Rice University before completing his doctorate in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Shimon then spent eight years as an Assistant and then an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam before joining Oxford as an Associate Professor in 2015. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2014.

Professor Whiteson’s research focuses on artificial intelligence. His goal is to design, analyse, and evaluate the algorithms that enable computational systems to acquire and execute intelligent behaviour. He particularly interested in machine learning, with which computers can learn from experience, and decision-theoretic planning, with which they can reason about their goals and deduce behavioural strategies that maximise their utility. In addition to theoretical work on these topics, in recent years he has also focused on applying them to practical problems in robotics and search engine optimisation.

At Oxford, Shimon is starting a major new project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant, about stochastic optimisation for reinforcement learning. He is also currently the scientific coordinator of the TERESA project, which aims to develop socially intelligent semi-autonomous telepresence robots.

In addition to academic work, he also serves as a consultant for industry and government agencies on matters related to artificial intelligence and machine learning.