Samuel Barrett
Bio
Sam is a senior research scientist at Sony AI, which he joined in 2019 when Sony AI acquired Cogitai.
He is currently working on artificial intelligence and games.
He previously worked at Amazon Robotics using AI to improve the performance of the robotics system inside Amazon's warehouses.
He received his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Texas at Austin in October 2014, where he worked with Peter Stone.
His dissertation examined the problem of ad hoc teamwork and cooperating with unknown teammates by exploiting previously learned knowledge.
In addition, he helped the UT Austin Villa team win the 2012 international RoboCup competition in the standard platform league (SPL).
Before joining UT, Sam received his B.S. in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology in May 2008.
Research
Sam's research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. He is primarily interested in reinforcement learning and how to build knowledge from experience in sequential decision making tasks. His dissertation focused on ad hoc teams: how agents should learn to deal with unknown teammates to accomplish shared goals. Sam's goal was to create agents that can cooperate with any other teammates in a new environment and can still learn to perform effectively. He used techniques in the areas of transfer learning and reinforcement learning to allow agents to quickly learn and adapt to new teammates. You can find out more about Sam's research through his publications.Professional Links
- Publications
- Sony AI Profile
- Gran Turismo Sophy Project
- Sony AI Meet the Team
- Making of Gran Turismo Sophy
- The Team Behind GT Sophy (including clips from Sam):
- Resume