Biography

Francois Rivest has an M.Sc. in machine learning from McGill University (Dean’s Honours List) and a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from University of Montreal. He is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science at the Royal Military College of Canada since 2010 and a member of the Center for Neuroscience Studies at Queen’s University since 2011. His current research focuses on understanding how animals learn so quickly, in particular timing, in order to develop better representation-construction algorithms for real-time machine learning. His research interests include the brain’s dopaminergic system, animal interval timing, machine reinforcement learning, and automatic construction of representations.