Open-Endedness

Danijar Hafner is a PhD candidate in artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto with Jimmy Ba and Geoffrey Hinton. He is also a researcher at the Brain Team at Google Research and the Vector Institute. He completed his MRes in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at UCL and the Gatsby Unit with Tim Lillicrap and Karl Friston.

Danijar's research focuses on building intelligent machines based on the computational principles of the brain and evaluating them in complex simulations. Specifically, he focuses on learning general world models and on reinforcement learning without rewards. His work is supported by the Canadian Vanier Scholarship.

Kenneth O. Stanley leads a research team at OpenAI on the challenge of open-endedness. He was previously Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and was also a co-founder of Geometric Intelligence Inc., which was acquired by Uber to create Uber AI Labs, where he was head of Core AI research. He received a B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and received a Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Texas at Austin. He is an inventor of the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), HyperNEAT, novelty search, and POET algorithms, as well as the CPPN representation, among many others.

His main research contributions are in neuroevolution (i.e. evolving neural networks), generative and developmental systems, coevolution, machine learning for video games, interactive evolution, quality diversity, and open-endedness. He has won best paper awards for his work on NEAT, NERO, NEAT Drummer, FSMC, HyperNEAT, novelty search, Galactic Arms Race, POET, and MCC. His original 2002 paper on NEAT also received the 2017 ISAL Award for Outstanding Paper of the Decade 2002 - 2012 from the International Society for Artificial Life. He is a coauthor of the popular science book, "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" (published by Springer), and has spoken widely on its subject.

Max is a Research Scientist and Open-Ended Learning Team Lead at DeepMind. Previously he co-founded Vision Factory which was acquired by Google in 2014, and completed his PhD at the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Zisserman and Prof. Andrea Vedaldi.

Tim is a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) London, an Associate Professor at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), and a Scholar of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Reinforcement Learning at the University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow in Computer Science at Jesus College, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Hertford College. Tim obtained his Ph.D. from UCL under the supervision of Sebastian Riedel, and he was awarded a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Scholarship in 2013 and a Google Ph.D. Fellowship in 2017. His work focuses on reinforcement learning in open-ended environments that require intrinsically motivated agents capable of transferring commonsense, world and domain knowledge in order to systematically generalize to novel situations.