David Abel

Reinforcement Learning

Winter 2025 I will be co-teaching the RL course at the University of Edinburgh with Prof. Michael Herrmann.

Artificial Intelligence & Society

One Summer at Brown I designed and taught a course on Artificial Intelligence & Society through Brown's STEM II Summer program. The course explored the central ideas of AI and the anticipated societal impacts of AI and automation.

CS8: A First Byte of Computer Science

CS8 presents a broad study of the big ideas of computer science, emphasizing the field's relevance to society and to other academic disciplines; it serves as an introductory CS course aimed at non-concentrators here at Brown. The course was designed by Prof. Michael Littman.

I taught CS8 at Brown during my PhD with an excellent group of TAs. All slides from the course are available below (as pdfs):

• Introduction: (1)
• Unit 0: Binary (1)
• Unit 1: Logic (1, 2, 3)
• Unit 2: Programming (1, 2)
• Unit 3: Algorithms (1, 2, 3)
• Unit 4: Databases (1, 2)
• Unit 5: Machine Learning (1, 2, 3)
• Unit 6: Computer Vision & Natural Language Processing (1, 2)
• Unit 7: Theory (1, 2, 3)
• Bonus Unit: Error Correcting Codes & Compression (1)
• Unit 8: Recursion (1, 2, 3)
• Unit 9: Cryptography (1, 2, 3)
• Unit 10: Applications (1, 2)
• Conclusions: (1, 2)

Some Talk Recordings

• Talk on the reward hypothesis at the RSS workshop on task specification.
• Talk on our paper A Definition of Continual RL at the UoE Agents reading group
• Talk on Three Dogmas of Reinforcement Learning at the ICML workshop on interactive learning.
• Panel on Slow Science at the New in ML NeurIPS workshop.
• Talk at Harvard on the research process in Chris Tanner's capstone course.
• Talk at RLDM on reward.
• Talk at MSR Redmond on abstraction in reinforcement learning.
• Talk at the meta-learning workshop at Neurips 2019.
• TED style talk through Brown called How Artificial Intelligence Should Model The World.

Miscellaneous

Guest on a podcast discussing our reward work

Honored to have won a teaching award at Brown!

My python tutorial can be found here.

Had a lovely chat with Colin Andrews through Somebody Call a Doctor to discuss AI, RL, and beyond (listen on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play)