Congratulations to HEED team member Dr James Brusey, who has recently been awarded a Professorship in Computer Science from Coventry University.
Professor Brusey, who has been involved in the delivery of E4E workshops in Nepal for HEED, is being recognised for his work on applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to real-world problems. RL is a sub-discipline of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is a form of machine learning related to, but separate from, supervised and unsupervised machine learning. He explains that a key function of RL is an ability to deal with situations involving uncertainty, which makes it highly applicable to a range of projects, such as autonomous, self-driving cars, as:
‘rather than learning a mapping from, say, a picture of a cat or dog to the phrase `cat’ or `dog’, RL learns a mapping from situations (or states) to actions, such as how to find a route through a maze. Critically, RL is able to handle cases where both the knowledge of the state and the result of actions are uncertain’.
Professor Brusey is hopeful that his work will increase opportunities for the creative use of RL in other fields, for example, the way RL is revolutionising the way neuroscience is conducted as it is able to navigate mathematical models that can explain complex neurological phenomena. He also sees his professorship as an opportunity to reach out to the wider community in understanding how RL, alongside Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, and IoT (Internet of Things) can be translated into systems that develop meaningful lived practices.
Find out more about Professor Brusey’s work via his research profile,follow him on twitter @ jbrusey or save a date in your diary for his inaugural speech, which will around 1st December 2019 at Coventry University .