Adam White’s research focuses on the problem of artificial intelligence and how to replicate or simulate human-level intelligence in physical and simulated agents.

Motivation and reward

Adam White’s research focuses on the problem of artificial intelligence and how to replicate or simulate human-level intelligence in physical and simulated agents. His research program explores how the problem of intelligence can be modelled as a reinforcement learning agent interacting with some unknown environment, learning from a scalar reward signal rather than explicit feedback. He is particularly interested in exploring knowledge representation and intrinsic motivation. He is the creator of RL-Glue, a language-independent communication protocol and evaluation framework for reinforcement learning experiments, was a co-author of the Horde architecture, a scalable real-time architecture for learning knowledge from unsupervised sensorimotor interaction. Adam’s other contributions include new algorithms for reinforcement learning, and large-scale demonstrations of learning on mobile robots.

Adam is a Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii, and an Assistant Professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Computing Science. At the University of Alberta, he is also a Principal Investigator in the Reinforcement Learning & Artificial Intelligence (RLAI) Lab. Previously, Adam was an Assistant Research Scientist at Indiana University. Adam was awarded the Paper of Distinction at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Developmental Robotics and Epigenetic Robotics and best paper award at the International Workshop on Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Systems in 2013. Adam’s papers have been published in leading AI conferences, including the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).