Riley Simmons-Edler
Postdoctoral Fellow in Rajan Lab
About
Riley Simmons-Edler is a postdoc in the lab of Kanaka Rajan, studying bio-inspired reinforcement learning. He was previously a PhD student at Princeton studying RL with Sebastian Seung, during which time he spent a couple years as an intern at Samsung AI research NYC working on robotic RL in particular. Prior to graduate school, Simmons-Edler worked on computational protein modeling during his time as an undergraduate at NYU.
Research Focus
Simmons-Edler’s research focuses on bio-inspired reinforcement learning. Modern deep reinforcement learning has a long way to go to match the capabilities of the brain, and his goal is to leverage insights from neuroscience to help close that gap. In particular, he is interested in generalization, or lack thereof, and why the brain is much more adaptable in some ways than modern deep RL methods.