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. In contrast to others with mathematical backgrounds who work in Computer Science, my focus is not on proving bounds or on other precise results about particular methods. Instead, I focus on demonstrating connections between existing concepts in Machine Learning, primarily through the language of Analysis. My most recent paper is Agent Spaces.
Background: I was born just before the third millenium near the end of 1999 and I have lived my entire life in Massachusetts, growing up in Middlesex County, northwest of Boston. I began attending the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2015, starting in Biology and then quickly moving through Chemistry to Mathematics. I graduated in 2019 Magna Cum Laude with a bachelor degree in Mathematics and have spent the last three years working under Hakho Lee at the Center for Systems Biology of the Massachusetts General Hospital working on Reinforcement Learning. In the fall of 2022 I will start as a Ph.D. student under Bruno Castro da Silva at the Autonomous Learning Laboratory of the University of Massachusetts Amherst where I will continue to work on Reinforcement Learning problems.
I am en/fr bilingual and I pronounce my name /dʒɑn si ɹeɪzbɛk/.