SGES Evening Lectures
Birkbeck College University of London
The Evening Lectures are free to both members and non-members of SGES.
Further information is available on the SGES website:
http://www.bcs-sges.org
Wednesday 5th May 1999 (6 pm)
Dr. Chris Watkins (University of London)
Learning from Delayed Rewards
ABSTRACT
Reinforcement learning is the study of how an agent may learn to
perform a task, given feedback in the form of rewards or punishments.
The task may have many stages, and rewards may be delayed so that
unpleasant preparatory actions may be necessary to obtain rewards
later. Originally inspired by analyses of animal learning,
reinforcement learning is starting to be applied to control,
scheduling, and routing systems. This talk will describe how
reinforcement learning problems can be formalised, and will go on to
survey recent demonstrations of learning applied to realistic tasks,
and also recent theoretical progress.
Chris Watkins obtained his BA and PhD at Cambridge in 1980 and 1989.
His PhD thesis was on reinforcement learning. He has worked at Philips
Research Labs, UK, for three fund management companies, and for a year
at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. He is currently a lecturer in
computer science at Royal Holloway, University of London, and his
research interests are in machine learning.
For further information contact:
Dr. Hui Liu, Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College
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