I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously I was an Applied Research Scientist at Element AI. I am interested in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of automated planning, heuristic search, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, and game-playing agents.

Contact me at x@ryerson.ca where x=rick.valenzano (ie. replace "x" with "rick.valenzano" without the quotation marks). Try and grab that email address, you meddling spambots.

You can also find me on LinkedIn.

News

September 2022 - I have been named as a distinguished PC Member for IJCAI-ECAI for being in the top 3% of reviewers

September 2022 - Teaching a grad class on Heuristic Search at Toronto Metropolitan University

September 2022 - Teaching a third year class on Artificial Intelligence at Toronto Metropolitan University

January 2022 - Teaching a first-year class at Toronto Metropolitan University

January 2022 - Teaching a grad class on Heuristic Search at Toronto Metropolitan University

January 2022 - Paper on Reward Machines published in JAIR

August 2021 - Paper appearing at IJCAI on incorporating random exploration into bounded suboptimal search

January 2021 - Starting as an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University

February 2020 - Teaching a course on Reinforcement Learning for the Queen's Master of Management in AI Program.