News

We recently launched LifelongML.org as a resource website for the ML community on lifelong machine learning. Check it out!

We won the sole best student paper award at IJCAI'16 for our paper on Zero-Shot Transfer in Lifelong Learning. Congratulations to David Isele and Mohammad Rostami, who were the co-first-authors on that paper!

Our paper on Autonomous Cross-domain Transfer in Lifelong RL was nominated for a best paper award at IJCAI 2015!

In November 2014, I co-chaired the AAAI 2014 Fall Symposium on Knowledge, Skill, and Behavior Transfer in Autonomous Robots.

We had a paper accepted to ICML'14: Online Multi-Task Learning for Policy Gradient Methods by Haitham Bou Ammar, Eric Eaton, Paul Ruvolo, and Matthew E. Taylor.

We had a paper accepted to AAAI'14: Online Multi-Task Learning via Sparse Dictionary Optimization by Paul Ruvolo and Eric Eaton.

We had a paper accepted to the AAAI-14 workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems: An Automated Measure of MDP Similarity for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning by Haitham Bou Ammar, Eric Eaton, Matthew E. Taylor, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Kurt Driessens, Gerhard Weiss and Karl Tuyls.

I am grateful to have received a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research: Lifelong Transfer Learning for Heterogenous Teams of Agents in Sequential Decision Processes with Matthew Taylor (PI) and Paul Ruvolo (Co-PI)

We completed a special issue of AI Magazine on Computational Sustainability, co-edited by Eric Eaton, Carla Gomes, and Brian Williams. It will appear later in 2014.

Welcome, Haitham!
Posted October 3, 2013
Haitham Bon Ammar will be joining my research group and the GRASP lab in November. Welcome, Haitham!

Postdoctoral Research Position
Posted May 3, 2013; Edited October 2, 2013
I have an Opening for a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Penn.
Update: Thank you for your interest, but the postdoc position has now been filled.

Congratulations, Paul!
Posted April 30, 2013
Paul Ruvolo will be leaving his postdoc to become an Assistant Professor at Olin College. Fantastic news!

I chaired the AAAI 2013 Spring Symposium on Lifelong Machine Learning
Posted April 3, 2013
In March 2013, I chaired the AAAI 2013 Spring Symposium on Lifelong Machine Learning. The symposium proceedings are available here through AAAI Press.

AAAI 2013 Paper Acceptance: Active Task Selection for Lifelong Learning
Posted March 30, 2013
Paul and I just had a paper accepted to AAAI 2013 on work enabling a lifelong learning agent to actively choose the next task to learn in order to maximize learning efficiency.

Call for AAAI 2013 Workshops Proposals
Posted March 15, 2013
I'm co-chairing the AAAI 2013 Workshop program along with Holger Hoos, and we're currently accepting proposals from anyone interested in running a AAAI workshop.

ICML 2013 Paper Acceptance: Efficient Lifelong Learning
Posted December 6, 2012
Paul and I just had a paper accepted to ICML 2013 on an efficient method for online multi-task learning in a lifelong learning setting. Our approach, known as ELLA, shows equivalent performance to batch multi-task learning methods with over a 1,000x speedup in learning all tasks. Most importantly, the computational complexity of the approach is independent of the number of tasks learned, enabling us to learn an individual new task with over 38,000x speedup.