November MLAI Meetup — Eike Germann, Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
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Eike Germann, Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
What is Reinforcement Learning?
How is it different from the machine learning we're familiar with?
Why do it?
I'll present some foundational ideas (Markov decision processes, policy iteration, value iteration etc) and talk about their limitations.
What algorithms are currently used to address those limitations and how do they do it?
Based on these, I’ll give a short overview of what RL is used currently used for - from training a machine to play space invaders to robotic movement in the real world.
As a way into RL, I’ll introduce the Open AI Gym package, which is trying to provide a platform for RL to benchmark developments.
To round up the presentation, I'll have a little demonstration of a simulated system trained with reinforcement learning.
Bio: I came to Australia a bit more than 10 years ago as an audio engineer working in corporate AV and decided to switch careers when it got a little boring. Because it's definitely not boring, I wound up doing a physics degree at Monash University. While I was there the effective altruist crowd got me interested in data science and I started doing data science courses, visiting meetups and decided that my future career would be in that field. Hence after finishing my honours degree last year, I'm now working as a data scientist at Eliza.ai :)