From Reinforcement Learning to Artificial Intelligence

On the occasion of being named Toyota Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Prof. Baveja will give a brief talk followed by a reception.

Satinder Singh Baveja is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2016 he co-founded a startup, Cogitai Inc., that seeks to revolutionize Artificial Intelligence by developing Continual Learning at scale, and is presently serving as its CTO and Chief Scientist. He served as the Director of the AI Laboratory for CSE at UM from 2006 to 2017. Prior to UM, he has been the Chief Scientist at Syntek Capital, a venture capital company, a Principal Research Scientist at AT&T Labs, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Science department. His research focus is on developing the theory, algorithms and practice of building artificial agents that can learn from interaction in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments, including environments with other agents in them. His main contributions have been to the areas of reinforcement learning, multi-agent learning, and more recently to applications in cognitive science and healthcare. Recent major projects include leading Project Sapphire, funded by IBM, that brought together 16 UM faculty and students together to build AI technologies to advance the state of the art on conversational systems. He is also serving as faculty liaison for UM’s collaboration with Toyota Research Institute.

Prof. Baveja is a Fellow of the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and has coauthored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences and has served on many program committee’s. He served as Program Co-Chair for the 31st AAAI conference (AAAI-17). He helped cofound RLDM (Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making), a multidisciplinary meeting that brings together computer scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, roboticists, control theorists, and others interested in animal and artificial decision making.