I am an assistant professor at the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, in the Intelligent Autonomous Systems group.  My research is primarily focused on single- and multi-agent decision-theoretic planning and learning, especially topics such as reinforcement learning, multi-agent planning and stochastic optimization methods like neuroevolution.

Current research efforts include best-match methods for reinforcement learning, multi-task reinforcement learning, balancing exploration and exploitation in information retrieval, neuroevolutionary helicopter control, analyzing novelty search, and optimally and approximately solving Dec-POMDPs. To find out more about my research, check out my research page or see my publication list.

News

May 2013: Maarten de Rijke and I are hiring another PhD student.  See the job ad here.

April 2013: Our article Fidelity, Soundness, and Efficiency of Interleaved Comparison Methods was accepted for publication in Transactions on Information Systems.

March 2013: Our paper  Critical Factors in the Performance of HyperNEAT was accepted for publication in GECCO-13.

February 2013: Our article Incremental Clustering and Expansion for Faster Optimal Planning in Decentralized POMDPs was accepted for publication in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

December 2012: Our papers Approximate Solutions for Factored Dec-POMDPs with Many Agents

and Using Informative Behavior to Increase Engagement in the TAMER Framework were accepted for publication in AAMAS-13.

October 2012: Our paper Reusing Historical Interaction Data for Faster Online Learning to Rank for IR was accepted for publication in WSDM-13.

October 2012: I have been awarded a grant by the Open Technology Program of STW (Dutch national technology foundation) for a 4-year project entitled Self-Optimizing Tracking Systems.

September 2012: Gwenn Englebienne and I are part of an international consortium that has been awarded a grant by the EU for a 3-year (FP7-STREP) project entitled Multi-Robot Cognitive Systems Operating in Hospitals.

June 2012: Our paper Exploiting Structure in Cooperative Bayesian Games was accepted for publication in UAI-12.