Education, research interests and all that
(despite the silly nature of the web site design, this part is actually supposed to be serious)
Generally speaking, I am interested in developing intelligent autonomous agents. What drives me towards this is mainly curiosity - I want to understand how intelligence works, and trying to create something seems like a good way to understand it.
I often appreciate the kind of perspective that a solid mathematical theory can offer. I also like to think of how artificial intelligence, especially learning methods, can benefit everyday life, although I haven’t worked on any application-related project yet.
In particular, most of the work I do falls under the umbrella of reinforcement learning. I have
coauthored papers on learning option policies, off-policy learning with recognizers and representing concepts in predictive terms. More recently I got interested in MDP planning with approximate and learned models. See my publications page for more details.
Currently, I am doing a PhD in computer science at McGill University, an anglophone patch in the middle of beautiful Montreal. I’m working in the Reasoning and Learning Lab with prof. Doina Precup and a great group of grad and undergrad students. Before this I was with the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence group at the University of Alberta, doing an MSc supervised by Rich Sutton and Vadim Bulitko. Going further back, I grew up in Roman, Romania and then went to the University of Bucharest where I got a BSc degree in computer science (spiced with quite a few math courses).
