Csaba Szepesvari – Biography

Csaba Szepesvári holds the prestigious position of Canada CIFAR AI Chair and leads the “Foundations” team at DeepMind. Additionally, he serves as a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Szepesvári completed his PhD in probability and statistics at József Attila University in Szeged, Hungary, in 1999.

Throughout his career, he has contributed a significant body of work to the field of AI, including the publication of three books, while also regularly publishing in leading journals and conferences. His work in the field has received various recognitions and was cited over 35,000 times.

Currently, he serves as the action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and an action editor of the Foundations and Trends journal, in addition to serving regularly on program committees of various machine learning and AI conferences. In 2022, he was a program co-chair for the “International Conference on Machine Learning”.

Dr. Szepesvari's main interest is developing principled, learning-based approaches to artificial intelligence (AI). He is the co-inventor of UCT, an influential Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm, a variant of which was used in the AlphaGo program which, in a landmark game, defeated the top Go professional Lee Sedol in 2016, ten years after the invention of UCT. In 2020, Dr. Szepesvari co-founded the weekly “Reinforcement Learning Theory virtual seminar series”, which showcases top theoretical work in the area of reinforcement learning with speakers and which is open to attendees from all over the world.