I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, focusing on reinforcement learning, which I believe is the most promising way to artificial general intelligence. I am honored to be supervised by Professor Rich Sutton.

My long-term research goal is to build simple, general, and scalable learning and planning algorithms for the reinforcement learning problem. I am particularly interested in designing these algorithms 1) that maximize the long-term average-reward objective, 2) with function approximation, and 3) with temporal abstractions.

Previously, I earned my Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), where I worked in SJTU Speech Lab, supervised by Professor Kai Yu. After that, I earned my Master's degree, also in ECE, from the University of Michigan. I had a great experience working in Intelligent Robotics Lab when I was in Michigan, supervised by Professor Ben Kuipers.

Email: wan6@ualberta.ca