Friday, March 1, 2002 - 6:30 p.m. Title: Reinforcement Learning Speaker: Jayprasad J. Hegde Venue: Lecture Theatre, NCST, Juhu

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning is all about simulating the manner in which humans would go about learning in real life. So, if you were presented with a game of chess and you did not know how to play it, how would you go about learning it? How would you go about learning it if you were told that out of the six games you played only 2 resulted in a victory? How do you figure out which game you have won? How do you figure out which strategies were successful or which strategies are a strict no-no? These are some of the issues you would face when posed a problem of learning a new concept, or in this case learning a new game. These are exactly the same issues which a system would have to deal with if it were to ever try and learn something using trial-and-error. Now, consider the implications of using such a learning mechanism: exploring the surface of Mars by learning how to navigate on-the-fly, building a world-class checkers-playing program using GAs and NNs, learning to acquire "soft" versions of a dictionary given a parallel corpus, learning new strategies for computer-controlled opponents in the latest 3D first-person shooting game... the list goes on. If you've missed out on the Machine Learning seminar given previously, then this would be a good time to attend the second of the Machine Learning seminars viz. Reinforcement Learning, since, we will recap some of the pertinent basics of Machine Learning, cover the basics of Reinforcement Learning, discuss some of the technologies involved and then round-off with a motivating case study.

About the Speaker: Jayprasad J. Hegde is a fitness-freak going under the guise of a Computer Scientist in the KBCS division at NCST. He claims to be working in the field of Natural Language Technology and have interests in Machine Learning, but one is rarely fortunate enough to see him around and confirm this. His only proof of existence seems to come from some of the articles that he keeps writing rather frequently, his knack for being available for "important" occasions like someone's birthday-treat and his picture on the his home-page. If you have seen him in your locality please dial KBCS and inform them. Please do not expect any rewards for doing so.