Rohan Nuttall

I am currently a graduate student in the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Alberta. My research interests center around two questions:

  • How can agents best learn reward and world models of/from human preferences? Can agents learn to distinguish good from bad?
  • What roles can reinforcement learning play in mitigating climate change impacts and improving institutional decision making?

I'm also interested in equitable education, roboethics, and how technology can help improve biodiversity, conservation and livelihoods. To this end, on weekends I help with writing software for Urban Biodiversity Hub and Iron & Earth. Previously, I interned with Kindred Systems and was a research assistant with the Energy, Technology and Architecture Lab at the University of British Columbia (UBC). There, I worked on machine learning models to understand the impacts of future climate change on the built environment. I also launched a sustainability open data portal for the university.

Before this, I enjoyed exploring the world of physics at UBC. I learned about the complexities of producing radioisotopes at TRIUMF, as well as how elegant particle physics experiments are designed with the PIENU collaboration.