Nicholas K. Jong

I am a graduate student working with Peter Stone in the Learning Agents Research Group. My research interests include machine learning and autonomous agents, and my thesis work addresses efficient exploration and structured generalization for reinforcement learning. See my Research page for more information.

I have been at the University of Texas since Fall 2002, getting my start helping robot dogs play soccer with UT Austin Villa. Along the way, I spent Summer 2005 at the IBM Watson Research Center developing algorithms that dynamically allocate resources in a corporate data center. My overall goal is to help computer systems of all kinds better adapt to the humans they serve, instead of forcing humans to adapt to them.

Nevertheless, I also enjoy teaching humans how to deal with computers. Most recently, I taught our department's Perl programming course from Fall 2007 to Fall 2008.