Towards Efficient Effective Reinforcement Learning Algorithms That Interact With People

Abstract:
There is increasing excitement about reinforcement learning-- a subarea of machine learning for enabling an agent to learn to make good decisions. Yet numerous questions and challenges remain for reinforcement learning to help support progress in applications that involve interacting with people, like education, consumer marketing and healthcare. I will discuss our work on some of the technical challenges that arise in this pursuit, including minimax PAC and regret bounds for reinforcement learning in tabular environments, and counterfactual reasoning from prior data.

Bio:
Emma Brunskill is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University where she leads the AI for Human Impact group. Her work focuses on reinforcement learning in high stakes scenarios-- how can an agent learn from experience to make good decisions when experience is costly or risky, such as in educational software, healthcare decision making, or people-facing applications.  She was previously a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the recipient of a multiple early faculty career awards (National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Microsoft Research)  and her group has received several best research paper nominations (CHI, EDMx3) and awards (UAI, RLDM).