About Me

I am currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Prior to Liverpool, I spent about 2.5 years as a Postdoctoral Researcher in reinforcement learning in the Whiteson Research Lab at the University of Oxford, advised by Shimon Whiteson. I was also a Non-Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at St Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford.

My research focuses mainly on (deep) reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, interactive machine learning, and curriculum learning. My primary research goal is to develop reinforcement learning algorithms that are more sample-efficient, robust, and scalable, with or without interacting with humans. During my postdoc, I worked mainly on developing new deep multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms for discrete and continuous cooperative multi-agent tasks. My PhD research focuses on interactive machine learning and curriculum learning, where we study how non-expert humans want to teach the agent to solve new complex sequential decision making tasks and how to incorporate these insights into the development of new machine learning algorithms.

I received my doctorate from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University in 2018, after working for five years at the Intelligent Robot Learning Lab with my advisor Matthew E. Taylor. Before that, I worked as a front-end web developer in Tencent after receiving my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China in 2012.

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