I am a Fellow of the Openmind Research Institute and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta.

I want to understand how the mind works and bring definition to its core phenomena. I draw inspiration from my peers across computer science, the cognitive studies, and philosophy to develop theories and algorithms.

My research is typically framed with concepts from reinforcement learning. Currently, I am thinking about the relationship between computation and agency. Can learning agents leverage the dynamics of their environment for computational benefit? Does computation influence the range of an agent’s experiences?

Over the years, I have studied a broad range of topics: the expressivity of rewards (link), meta-learning efficient planning strategies (link), organizing unstructured sense data (link), distributional RL (link). I have also studied various applied problems in chip design, robotics, and aviation. Long ago, I helped build the world’s first full-scale autonomous helicopter (link).

NEWS

April, 2026: Visiting DeepMind in London.
April, 2026: Talk at the Institute of Philosophy in London.
April, 2026: Visiting Cambridge.
January, 2026: Talk at UTAR in Malaysia.
December, 2025: Attending NeurIPS in San Diego, USA.
August, 2025: Attending RLC in Edmonton, Alberta.
July, 2025: Talks at Caltech and JPL.
June, 2025: Attending RLDM in Dublin, Ireland.
March, 2025: Steering committee for the second edition of Finding the Frame.
March, 2025: Talk at Openmind workshop in Edmonton, Alberta.
January, 2025: New paper led by Fatima Davelouis: [pdf].
January, 2025: Co-organizing an RLDM workshop: Saving the Phenomena of Minds.
December, 2024: Spoke about embodiment at the Openmind retreat in Singapore.
December, 2024: Started as a Research Fellow at Openmind.
October, 2024: Talk at the Openmind retreat in Banff, Alberta.
October, 2024: Seattle M&Ms Talk: The Methodological Tangle of AI Research.
August, 2024: UofA Teatime Talk: The Methodological Tangle of AI Research.
August, 2024: Attending RLC in Amherst, Massachusetts.
July, 2024: New paper on Meta-Gradient Search Control: [pdf].
June, 2024: Talk at Cohere for AI.
March, 2024: Co-organizing an RLC Workshop: Finding the Frame.
July, 2023: Attending ICML in Honolulu to present Settling the Reward Hypothesis.
May, 2023: Attending Upperbound in Edmonton, Canada.
April, 2023: Settling the Reward Hypothesis, accepted to ICML 2023 as an oral!
March, 2023: Two ICLR workshop papers, led by Rafael Rafailov: [pdf-1], [pdf-2].
February, 2023: In Barbados for the RL Workshop on Lifelong Learning.

Formal Intro

Here is a formal bio that can be used to introduce me.