Csaba Szepesvari – Biography

Csaba Szepesvari is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, the team-lead for the “Foundations” team at DeepMind and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He earned his PhD in 1999 from Jozsef Attila University, in Szeged, Hungary. In addition to regularly publishing at top tier journals and conferences, he has (co-)authored three books. Currently, he serves as the action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and as an associate editor of the Mathematics of Operations Research journal, in addition to serving regularly on program committees of various machine learning and AI conferences. 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.