Abstract: 

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an interesting and challenging area of semi-supervised machine learning that has a wide variety of applications including games, personalized recommendation, bidding and advertising, robotics, traffic light control and many others. RL can autonomously get optimal policy with the knowledge obtained by trial-and-error and continuously interacting with a dynamic environment. Recent research in Deep learning (DL), Reinforcement learning (RL), and their combination (Deep RL) promises to revolutionize Artificial Intelligence. The growth in computational power accompanied by faster and increased data storage and declining computing costs have allowed scientists and engineers in various fields to apply these techniques on datasets that were previously considered intractable for their size and complexity. In this talk, I will present the fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning along with its recent advances, applications and challenges.

Bio: 

Dr. Ankur Narang has 26 years of experience in Senior Technology Leadership positions across MNCs including IBM Research India and Sun Research Labs (Oracle), CA, USA. He was one amongst Top-10 Data Scientists in India in 2017 (Analytics India Mag) in recognition of solid scientific and industry contributions to the field of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Dr.Ankur Narang heads the AI division at Hike as Vice President – AI and Data Technologies, where he leads state-of-the-art research and development projects on NLP, Chatbots, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition and related AI/ML areas. He holds B.Tech. & Ph.D. from IIT Delhi in CS&E and has 45+ publications in top international Computer Science & Machine Learning conferences and journals, along with 15 granted US patents and 25 pending. He has held multiple Industrial Track and Workshop Chair positions, and has given invited talks in multiple international conferences. As Co-founder of Sigmoidstar, he drives various training initiatives and consulting projects in AI and latest technologies including Blockchain as applied to various domains such as Ecommerce, Healthcare, Advertising, Education and others.