The first class takes place Monday, January 6, 2020.
When: Monday and Wednesday, 8:35-9:55am
What: The goal of this class is to provide an introduction to reinforcement learning, a very active sub-field of machine learning. Reinforcement learning is concerned with building programs that learn how to predict and act in a stochastic, dynamic environment, based on past experience. Applications of reinforcement learning range from classical control problems, such as powerplant optimization or dynamical system control, to game playing, inventory control, and many other fields. Notably, reinforcement learning has also produced very compelling models of animal and human learning. During this course, we will study theoretical properties and practical applications of reinforcement leanring. We will follow the second edition of the classic textbook by Sutton & Barto (available online), but we will supplement it with papers and other materials.
Doina Precup
School of Computer Science
Office: McConnell Engineering building, room 111N (left from elevators)
Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday, 10:00-11:00am
Phone: (514) 398-6443
E-mail: dprecup@cs.mcgill.ca
Nishanth Anand
Office hours: TBD
Veronica Chelu
Office hours: TBD
Khimya Khetarpal
Office hours: TBD
MyCourses will be used only for bulletin board, discussion groups and assignment submission and grading.