Reinforcement Learning
News & features
Learning to teach: Mutually enhanced learning and teaching for artificial intelligence
| Fei Tian
Teaching is super important. From an individual perspective, a student learning on his or her own is never ideal; a student needs a teacher’s guidance and perspective to be more effectively educated. Taking the societal perspective, teaching enables civilization to…
Malmo, Minecraft and machine learning with Dr. Katja Hofmann
Episode 39, August 29, 2018 – Dr. Hofmann talks about her vision of a future where machines learn to collaborate with people and empower them to help solve complex, real-world problems. She also shares the story of how her early…
Optimizing imperative functions in relational databases with Froid
| Karthik Ramachandra
For decades, databases have supported declarative SQL as well as imperative functions and procedures as ways for users to express data processing tasks. While the evaluation of declarative SQL has received a lot of attention resulting in highly sophisticated techniques,…
Machine Learning for fair decisions
| Miro Dudík, John Langford, Hanna Wallach, and Alekh Agarwal
Over the past decade, machine learning systems have begun to play a key role in many high-stakes decisions: Who is interviewed for a job? Who is approved for a bank loan? Who receives parole? Who is admitted to a school?…
In the news | The Globe and Mail
Going Deep
El Asri, a research manager at Microsoft’s Montreal research lab, and her colleagues are grappling with the challenge of designing computer systems that can interact with humans the way humans interact with one another.
In the news | The Globe and Mail
More brains: Microsoft leads hunt to bring global AI experts to Canada
Canada is gearing up for its second wave of brain gains in the hot field of artificial intelligence. The country’s global leadership in AI began when deep learning pioneer Geoff Hinton decamped from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for the…
Hybrid Reward Architecture and the Fall of Ms. Pac-Man with Dr. Harm van Seijen
If you’ve ever watched King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, you know what a big deal it is to beat a video arcade game that was designed not to lose. Most humans can’t even come close. Enter Harm van Seijen,…
‘Contextual bandit’ breakthrough enables deeper personalization
| Miro Dudík
News portals that simultaneously personalize every part of the landing page for every visitor and mobile health apps that adaptively tweak every part of an exercise regimen to maximize the benefit of every user are becoming plausible due to an…
In the news | The AI Blog
Divide and conquer: How Microsoft researchers used AI to master Ms. Pac-Man
Microsoft researchers have created an artificial intelligence-based system that learned how to get the maximum score on the addictive 1980s video game Ms. Pac-Man, using a divide-and-conquer method that could have broad implications…