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January 2023 - I just found this page. It's about 15 years out of date. I'm at DeepMind now, as a Research Engineer.

Hi there, welcome to Brian Tanner's research homepage.

You can reach me at: brian@tannerpages.com

Me

I'm currently a Ph.D student at the University of Alberta, studying reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence with Professor Richard Sutton. I live in Edmonton with my wife Ariel, my son Lincoln (Link), and my two dogs Scooter and Trinity.

Interests

My research interests have always been in AI, specifically in creating intelligent systems that can learn and improve their performance with minimal human interference. I want the agent to learn things for itself, and I don't mind if it takes longer. I co-chaired a workshop at NIPS 2006 on this topic. An important step on this path is to figure out how we can fairly evaluate AI algorithms so that we know what methods to prefer. This has lead to an interest in empirical evaluation of reinforcement learning algorithms. I was the technical committee chair for the 2008 RL-Competition, and am currently working on a large system for evaluating RL algorithms, the RL-Logbook..

I've also been busy with various open source projects like RL-Glue, RL-Viz, and the RL-Library. You could say that I'm a big believer in improving the field by empowering the community with tools and projects that hopefully make their life easier.

Before my Ph.D, I did a Masters in Alberta, also with Rich, on Temporal-Difference Networks. Before that, I got an Honours Bachelor of Science from the University of Manitoba, where I worked with Dr. John Anderson.