Marek Grzes
About
I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of York (UK) in 2010 for working on reinforcement learning. Subsequently, I had research positions in Scotland and Canada, and I joined the School of Computing at Kent in 2015 as a lecturer. I am interested in both fundamental and applied machine learning research, and I am currently enjoying working with a bunch of dedicated research students and teaching modules related to data analysis and artificial intelligence.
Academic Genealogy
A fairly deep tree of my academic ancestors is here.
Research interests
I belong to the following research groups:
My current research efforts focus on various aspects of machine learning and artificial intelligence: Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, neural networks, decision trees, natural language processing, chatbots, and probabilistic inference. For several years, I was focusing mostly on reinforcement learning where the goal is to learn intelligent behaviour using data or sampling from a real or a simulated environment. For example, an algorithm can learn how to play a game using a set of past games, or it can play against a human or a simulator in order to improve its behaviour. My work on sequential decision-making included also planning where an algorithm knows the parameters (dynamics) of the game, and it can perform a direct optimisation of its own strategy. In my past life, I invested part of my professional time in research on nature-inspired algorithms for optimisation and machine learning.
My full list of publications is here.
Software
Teaching
In our school, we engage in collaborative teaching where most modules are shared between at least two people. I am involved in teaching the following modules:
Supervision
Reinforcement learning; AI; deep learning; neural networks
PhD Students
- Mr Lee Harris
- Ms Lisa Bonheme
- Mr Piotr Sawicki
- Mr Théophile Champion (Howard Bowman main supervisor)
- Mr Peter Clapham
- Mr Declan Collins (Howard Bowman main supervisor)
Past Research Students
- Farhana Ferdousi Liza (Senior Research Officer at the University of Essex)
PhD degree approved in 2020
Thesis title: Improving Training of Deep Neural Network Sequence Models
Professional
Event Organiser
- The Eleventh International Workshop on Agents and Data Mining Interaction (ADMI) at Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems conference (AAMAS)
- ICAPS 2014 International Probabilistic Planning Competition (IPPC) Discrete Track, Co-organised with Jesse Hoey and Scott Sanner
- The 2011 Adaptive Learning Agents workshop (ALA) at Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems conference (AAMAS), Co-organised with Peter Vrancx and Matthew Knudson
- The 2010 Adaptive Learning Agents workshop (ALA) at Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems conference (AAMAS), Co-organised with Matthew Taylor
Senior Programme Committee Member
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020
- Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS), 2020
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2019
Programme Committee Member
- Workshop on Data Mining for Ageing, Rehabilitation and Independent Assisted Living (ARIAL) at International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2017
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017
- Adaptive Learning Agents workshop (ALA) at Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems conference (AAMAS), 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017
- Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS), 2010, 2011, 2014, 2018
- Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI), 2013
- Simulation and AI in Games Conference (GAME-ON), 2010
Conference/ Workshop Reviewer
- ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), 2018
- Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
- ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI), 2016, 2017
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2013, 2014, 2015 (Reviewer Award), 2016, 2017
- International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2016, 2017, 2018
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2016, 2017
- NIPS Workshop on Interpretable Machine Learning for Complex Systems (IMLCS), 2017
- International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2012, 2013, 2014
- IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), 2014
- IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EPIROB), 2014
- Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS), 2012
- International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), 2011
- Intelligent Agent Technology Conference (IAT), 2008
Journal Reviewer
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIIM); Cognitive Neurodynamics; Connection Science Journal (CS); Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI); Frontiers of Computer Science (FSC); IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (SC); IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC); Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR); Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (JAAMAS); Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE); Machine Learning Journal (ML); The Knowledge Engineering Review Journal (KER); IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing;
Edited volumes
- Peter Vrancx, Matt Knudson and Marek Grzes (Eds.): Adaptive and Learning Agents, LNAI, Vol. 7113, Springer, 2012.
- Peter Vrancx, Matt Knudson and Marek Grzes (Eds.): Proceedings of AAMAS 2011 Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA 2011), Taipei, Taiwan, 2011 (pdf)
- Marek Grzes and Matthew E. Taylor (Eds.): Proceedings of AAMAS 2010 Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA 2010), Toronto, Canada, 2010 (pdf)
