Tim Rudner awarded Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Congratulations to New College DPhil student Tim Rudner, who was awarded a prestigious Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship in August. 

Tim won the Fellowship in support and recognition of his doctoral research in machine learning. Tim’s proposal - 'A Fully Probabilistic Theory of Autonomous Decision Making' - is about developing a fully probabilistic framework for reinforcement learning to provide reliable and mathematically rigorous uncertainty quantification. In contrast to previous approaches, he proposes to treat both the learning process as well as the model components, such an agent’s policy, probabilistically. The approach will combine advances in probabilistic inference and modelling with probabilistic reinforcement learning. This will enable autonomous vehicles and machines to 'know what they know' as well as what they don’t know, and therefore to operate more safely and reliably.

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship is an annual program that focuses on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring the most innovative engineering PhD students across Europe, India, and the United States.  The Europe program rewards excellent young researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity with individual prizes of $40,000, dedicated mentors from the Qualcomm Technologies team as well as the opportunity to present their work in person to an audience of technical leaders at the company’s HQ in San Diego.

Find out more about Tim and his research.