Satinder Baveja

Satinder Singh Baveja

Satinder Singh Baveja is an Indian-American reinforcement learning researcher. He is the Toyota professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan where he also serves as the current Director of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is an AAAI fellow and a member at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. He was a co-founder and CTO of Cogitai (now a part of Sony AI), a company aimed at making Reinforcement Learning and Continual Learning accessible to a wide range of industrial applications. He also serves as a Distinguished Research Scientist at DeepMind. Dr. Singh's research interests focus on the field of Reinforcement Learning, i.e., on building algorithms, theory, and architectures for software agents that can learn how to act in uncertain, complex, and dynamic environments.

Education

Born in New Delhi, he did his schooling from St. Columba's School. Dr. Baveja holds a bachelor's degree from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He joined the University of Michigan in 2002 after a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Brain and Cognitive Sciences under Michael I. Jordan, at MIT.

Career

After completing his postdoctoral in 1995, Dr. Baveja joined Harlequin Inc. and was Senior Research Scientist in the Adaptive Systems Group headed by Peter Norvig. From 1996 to 1998, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado.

In 1998, Satinder became a Principal Member Technical Staff in the AI department at AT&T Labs where he worked with Richard S. Sutton and Doina Precup from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Together, they tackled the difficult problem of giving artificial intelligence a way to understand and represent knowledge that abstracts over temporal details. Their paper "Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning" was a major breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence and was selected for the 2019 Classic Paper Award by the Artificial Intelligence Journal. The AI Journal has recognized classic papers since 2012, selecting up to two key influential publications annually.

He became an Associate Professor in 2002 and a full professor in September, 2008, in the Division of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

In 2015, Satinder Singh, along with two leading AI researchers- Mark Ring and Peter Stone, co-founded Cogitai, Inc. He was the CTO and Chief Scientist of Cogitai, Inc., and assembled a "Brain Trust" consisting of ten of the world’s academics in AI, who were actively engaged in technology development. On May 17, 2016, Sony Corporation announced that it has teamed with Cogitai. Specifically, Sony has invested in Cogitai and the two companies plan to collaborate towards the development of novel AI technologies using deep reinforcement learning with prediction technology that could be used as the basis for the next generation of AI applications and products. After 3 years, in January 2019, Sony decided to purchase Cogitai for an undisclosed amount.

Since the beginning of 2020, Satinder Singh has been working with DeepMind as a Distinguished Research Scientist.

Research

Baveja's research mainly focuses on Deep Learning & Reinforcement Learning as well as Meta Learning & Reinforcement Learning. His goal is to develop a theory of and algorithms for building autonomous agents that can learn to be broadly competent in complex, partially known, stochastic, and real-world environments. In addition, he has provided significant contributions to research in Computational Game Theory, Cognitive Science and Human-Computer Interaction.

In September, a team of researchers at the University of Michigan led by Satinder Singh Baveja, began a multi-year project 'Sapphire' funded by IBM to create an AI that students can talk to when they need advising.

Baveja, Satinder Singh (February 1994). Learning to Solve Markovian Decision Processes (PDF) (Thesis). University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Awards

• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellowship, 2011
• EECS Outstanding Achievement Award, 2012 for innovative research in reinforcement learning, developing new undergraduate courses in machine learning and computational art, and for leading the CSE search committee and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
• Best Paper Award at International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems 2015- Selected for the conference Best Paper Award was “The Dependence of Effective Planning Horizon on Model Accuracy,” which was authored by CSE graduate student Nan Jiang, CSE postdoctoral researcher Alex Kulesza, EECS Prof. Satinder Singh Baveja, and Psychology and Linguistics Prof. Richard L. Lewis.
• A $3 million endowment by Toyota to support a professorship awarded to Satinder Singh Baveja.
• 2019 Classic Paper Award by the Artificial Intelligence Journal given to a paper co-authored by Toyota Professor of Artificial Intelligence.

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