Team

Current group

Post-doctoral fellows

PhD Students

• Roshan Shariff. 2015/12/29–

• Alex Ayoub. Co-supervised with Dale Schuurmans. 2021/09/01–

• Gábor Mihucz 2022/06/08–

• Vlad Tkachuk. Co-supervised with Xiaoqi Tan 2023/03/13–

• Siting Wang 2023/08/26–

• Shuai Liu. Co-supervised with Xiaoqi Tan 2024/08/07–.

MSc Students

• Alireza Bakhtiari. 2022/03/10–

• Samuel Robertson. 2023/04/17–

• Thang Duc Chu. 2024/03/19–

Summer Students

• Gaurav Mahajan, 2022 Summer & Fall

• Ayoush Sekhari, 2021 Summer & Fall

• Matt Regehr, 2021 Summer

• Philip Amortila, 2020 Summer, 2021 Summer

• Nivasini Ananthakrishnan, 2020 Summer

Alumni

Post-doctoral fellows, research associates

• Flore Sentenac. 2023/09/01-2024/04/01

• Zixin Zhong. Start: 2022 July End 2024 July

• David Janz. Start: 2021 October (remotely, as a research associate for various administrative reasons, PDF start 2022 July) End 2024 August

• Johannes Kirschner. Start: 2021 September. End: 2024

• Tadashi Kozuno. 02/2021-07/2022. Present position: Somewhere in Tokyo..

• Sharan Vaswani. 11/2020-12/2021. Present position: Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

• Omar Rivasplata. Start: 2016 September with the PhD program, but already had a PhD in probability theory. At UCL from 2017 November, co-supervised with John-Shawe Taylor Present position: Senior Research Fellow, University College London

• Omid Namaki Shoushtari 2015-2017. Present position: AMII.

• Chandrashekar Lakshmi Narayanan, 07/2016-07/2017. Present position: faculty at IIT Palakkad.

• Karim T. Abou-Moustafa 07/2016-07/2017. Present position: research scientist at SAS Institute, Inc.

• Tor Lattimore 2014-2016. Present position: senior research scientist at DeepMind, London, UK

• András György. Present position: Senior research scientist at DeepMind, London, UK

• András Antos. Present position: researcher at Morgan Stanley

• Dávid Pál 07/2009-07/2011. Present position: Research scientist at Expedia, NY

• István Szita 2010-08/2011. Present position: Software engineer at Google, Zürich

• Barnabás Póczos 2007-2010. Present position: Faculty at CMU

• Sandra Zilles 06/2007-06/2009. Present position: Faculty at the University of Regina

• Levente Kocsis 2005-2006. Present position: Senior researcher at SZTAKI, Hungary.

PhD students

• Gellért Weisz. UCL supervisor: Ilija Bugonovic. 2020/09/01-2024/02/05. Thesis: The Complexity of Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation

• Mohammad Mahdi Ajallooeian 2013-2018, co-supervised with Martin Müller. Present position: Machine Learning Scientist and Educator at Amii

• Pooria Joulani 2012 September 1- 2018 December 11, co-supervised with András György.
  Thesis: Online optimization for machine learning: parallelism, adaptivity, and model selection. Present position: research scientist at DeepMind, London.

• Ruitong Huang 2011 February 9- 2017 September 28, co-supervised with Dale Schuurmans.
  Thesis: Instance-dependent analysis of learning algorithms.
  Present position: research scientist at Borealis Research, Edmonton, Canada.

• Özlem Aslan 2011 February 4-2017 January 5, co-supervised with Dale Schuurmans.
  Thesis: Convex Latent Modeling
  Present position: research scientist at Deepmind, London, UK.

• Bernardo Avila Pires 2011 April 2-2016 October 19.
  Thesis: Toward Practical Reinforcement Learning Algorithms: Classification Based Policy Iteration and Model-Based Learning.
  Present position: research scientist at Deepmind, London, UK.

• Gábor Balázs 2009 November 20-2016 August 12, co-supervised with Dale Schuurmans.
  Thesis: Convex Regression: Theory, Practice, and Applications.
  Present position: quantitative analyst at Causality Group Madrid.

• Kiarash Shaloudegi ECE Student, , 2014 January 1-2016 March, co-supervised with András György and Wilsun Xu.
  Present position: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

• Hengshuai Yao 2008-2015.
  Thesis: Model-based Reinforcement Learning with State and Action Abstractions
  Present position: AI Tech Lead at Huawei Research, Edmonton

• Yaoliang Yu 05/2009-11/2013, co-supervised with Dale Schuurmans.
  Thesis: Fast Gradient Algorithms for Structured Sparsity. Winner of the Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A and of the 2015 Best Doctoral Dissertation Award of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. Present position: Faculty at the University of Waterloo.

• Gergely Neu (BME) 2008-2013, co-supervised with Laci Györfi and András György.
  Thesis: Online Learning in Non-Stationary Markov Decision Processes. Winner of the Pro Scientia Gold Medal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, PhD student of the year at MTA SZTAKI for three years, MTA SZTAKI Young Researcher Award for excellent research activity. Present position: Research Assistant Professor at the AI group, DTIC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

• Alireza Farhangfar. 2010 November 23-2013 March 15, co-supervised with Russ Greiner.
  Thesis: Novel Machine Learning Algorithms
  Present position: Data Scientist at Apple.

• Arash Afkanpour. 2010 March 18-2013 March 15, co-supervised with Michael Bowling.
  Thesis: Multiple Kernel Learning with Many Kernels
  Present position: Senior Software Engineer at Google, Kitchener, Canada.

• Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori. 2009 March 4-2012 September 28.
  Thesis: Online Learning for Linearly Parametrized Control Problems
  Nominated for Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A.
  Present position: Research Scientist at DeepMind.

• Gábor Bartók. 2008 February 13-2012 July 8.
  Thesis: The role of information in online learning
  Winner of the 2013 Best Doctoral Dissertation Award Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association.
  Present position: Software Engineer at Google, Zürich.

• Amir massoud Farahmand. 2006-2011. co-supervised with Martin Jagersand.
  Thesis: Regularities in Sequential Decision-Making Problems
  Winner of the Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, Dept. of Comp.Sci., U.of.A.
  Present position: Faculty Member & Research Scientist, Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute.

• Péter Torma (ELTE)
  Thesis: Towards efficient vision-based object tracking algorithms: rehabilitating visual information in particle filtering.
  Winner of the Pro Scientia Gold Medal of the Hungarian National Academy of Sciences.
  Present position: Founder, CEO of Lateral Reality, Ltd.

• Zoltán Szamonek ELTE, 2007. Zoltan decided to quit his program and since then he is an SE at Google in Zürich.

MSc Students

• Kushagra Chandak. Co-supervised with Nidhi Hegde. 2022/03/14–2023/11/21 Thesis: Differentially Private Algorithms for Efficient Online Matroid Optimization

• Vlad Tkachuk. 2022/01/01–2023/11/21 Thesis: On Efficient Planning in Large Action Spaces with Applications to Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Continuing in the PhD program.

• Shuai Liu. 2022/03/14–2023/11/21. Thesis: Perturbed History Exploration in Stochastic Subgaussian Generalized Linear Bandits Continuing in the PhD program.

• Chang Liu. 2022/03/22-2023/11/21 Continuing at UCLA in the PhD program

• Valentin Tiriac. 2021/03/31-2024/08/01 (sadly, did not finish)

• Connor Stephens. 2020/03/18–2023/06/14

• Yue (Anna) Gao. 2018-2021. Position after graduation: Research Scientist at Quincus.

• Alex Ayoub. 2020/02/21–2021/11/19. Continued in the PhD program. Thesis: Toward Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation

• Dong Wang, co-supervised with Ilbin Lee. (2020-2021). Thesis: Optimized Batch Policy Evaluation in the Presence of Monotone Responses

• Mikhail Konobeev (2019-2021); finished while working with Martha White. Position after graduation: PhD student, Lausanne, Switzerland.

• Shun Jie Lau (2012-2018). Present position: Software Developer at CEMWorks Inc.

• Xiaowei Hu, 2015 Jan 1-2016 December 20
  Thesis: Bandit Convex Optimization with Biased Noisy Gradient Oracles. Present position: S.E. at Microsoft, Vancouver.

• Yifan Wu, 2014 March 13-2016 August 31, co-supervised with András György
  Thesis: Online Learning under partial feedback.
  Co-winner of the Outstanding MSc Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A, 2016. 2017 Master's Thesis Award of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. Position after graduation: PhD student at CMU

• Roshan Shariff, 2012 March 26-2015 June
  Thesis: Exploiting Symmetries to Construct Efficient MCMC Algorithms with an Application to SLAM.
  Position after graduation: Continuing in the PhD program.

• Hao Cheng, 2012 April 1-2013 September 20, co-supervised with Dale Schuurmans.
  Thesis: Bregman Divergence Clustering: A Convex Approach.
  Nominated for Outstanding MSc Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A
  Position after graduation: PhD student at the University of Washington

• Jamie Kiros, 2012 March 28-2013 June 5,
  Thesis: Learning Deep Representations, Embeddings and Codes from the Pixel Level of Natural and Medical Images.
  Winner of the Outstanding MSc Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A.
  Position after graduation: PhD student at the University of Toronto.

• Navid Zolghadr, 2011 April 15- 2013 January 30. co-supervised with Russ Greiner
  Thesis: Probe-Efficient Learning.
  Present position: Software Engineer at Google.

• Mohammad Ajallooeian, 2011 March 21-2013 January 31, co-supervised with András György
  Thesis: Optimal Mechanisms for Machine Learning: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Designing Machine Learning Competitions.
  Position after graduation: Continued in the PhD program.

• Pooria Joulani, 2011 March 31- 2012 September 26, co-supervised with András György.
  Thesis: Multi-Armed Bandit Problems under Delayed Feedback.
  Nominated for Outstanding MSc Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A.
  Position after graduation: Continued in the PhD program.

• Bernardo Avila Pires, 2009-2011.
  Thesis: Statistical analysis of L1-penalized linear estimation with applications.
  Nominated for Outstanding MSc Thesis Award, Dept. of CS, U. of A.
  Position after graduation: Continued in the PhD program.

• Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori
  Thesis: Forced-Exploration Based Algorithms for Playing in Bandits with Large Action Sets 2008.
  Position after graduation: Continued in the PhD program.

• Varun Grover,
  Thesis: Active Learning and its Application to Heteroscedastic Problems (2008),
  Position after graduation: Systems Analyst, City of Edmonton.

• Gergely Neu BME,
  Thesis: Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Its Application to Learning to Parse.
  Position after graduation: Continued in the PhD program at BME, see above.

• Volodymyr Mnih Thesis: Efficient Stopping Rules.
  Position after graduation: PhD student at the University of Toronto.

• Zoltán Kömives ELTE; co-supervised with András György 2007.
  Position after graduation: IT Consultant at SK Point. Currently Software Engineer at J.P. Morgan & Chase, UK, Glasgow.