Biography
Research Interests: I am a Ph.D. student studying Reinforcement Learning at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My interest is in bringing conceptual rigor to Reinforcement Learning and Machine Learning more broadly using the techniques of mathematics. I focus on demonstrating connections between existing concepts in Machine Learning, primarily through the language of Analysis, rather than on traditional "RL theory", which focuses on the analysis of algorithms.
I was born just before the third millenium in Boston, and I've lived in Massachusetts for my whole life. I got my Bachelors of Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2015, where I started with a major focus in Biology, switched to Chemistry, and then finally switched to Mathematics. I graduated in 2019 Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Mathematics, then spent three years working under Hakho Lee at the Center for Systems Biology of the Massachusetts General Hospital on Reinforcement Learning. Since Fall 2022, I have been a Ph.D. student under Bruno Castro da Silva at the Autonomous Learning Laboratory of the University of Massachusetts Amherst where I work on Reinforcement Learning.
I speak English and French and I pronounce my name /dʒɑn si ɹeɪzbɛk/.