I am a leading researcher in foundational AI and information security. My recent works include a breakthrough result on the 25+ year old problem of perfectly secure steganography (jointly with Sam Sokota), which was featured by Scientific American , Quanta Magazine, and Bruce Schneier’s Security Blog, as well as illusory attacks, a novel form of adversarial attack on reinforcement learning agents (Spotlight at ICLR 2024). During my Ph.D., I helped establish the field of cooperative deep multi-agent reinforcement learning, resulting in popular learning algorithms such as QMIX, MACKRL, IPPO, and FACMAC, and the standard benchmark environments SMAC and Multi-Agent MuJoCo.
I am currently a postdoc with Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford, and a former visiting researcher with Turing Award-winner Prof. Yoshua Bengio at MILA (Quebec) and postdoc with FLAIR. Previously, I completed my DPhil (Ph.D.) “Coordination and Communication in Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” with Prof. Philip Torr (Torr Vision Group) and Prof. Shimon Whiteson (WhiRL), which won an EPSRC IAA Doctoral Impact Fund Award and is, according to my examiner Prof. Frans Oliehoek, a “standard reference in the field”.
I hold distinguished masters degrees in Physics, as well as Computer Science (both University of Oxford), during the latter of which I proved an open incompleteness theorem in categorical quantum mechanics (the completed ZX-calculus is now a mainstream tool in quantum computing).
In 2022, I was selected as a “30 under 35 rising strategist (Europe)” by Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum and the European Council on Foreign Relations. I also received a Best Idea award from the CCAI community in 2019 for work on solar geoengineering and deep multi-agent learning.
Please contact me if you are interested in working with me. I supervise undergraduate projects, master’s theses, and co-supervise Ph.D. projects in a wide range of topics in both deep multi-agent learning, and information security.
Some of my students and mentees include:
DPhil (PhD) in Engineering Science, Jan 2017 - Nov 2021
University of Oxford, St. Catherine's College
MSc Computer Science - Distinction, Oct 2012 - Sep 2013
University of Oxford, Kellogg College
MPhys (Physics) - First, Oct 2008 - Jul 2012
University of Oxford, Exeter College
[16/01/24] Many congratulations to DPhil student Tim Franzmeyer for winning a Spotlight at ICLR'2024 for our project Illusory Attacks!
[21/12/23] My Master’s student Linas Nasvytis’ work on Out-of-Distribution Dynamics Detection for Reinforcement Learning has been accepted for an Oral Presentation at AAMAS 2024. Congratulations, Linas!
[1/09/23] My work on Perfectly Secure Steganography (with Sam Sokota) is featured on Bruce Schneier’s Security Blog!
[1/09/23] My work on Perfectly Secure Steganography (with Sam Sokota) is featured on Bruce Schneier’s Security Blog!
[31/08/23] My work on Perfectly Secure Steganography (with Sam Sokota) is featured in Scientific American (both print and online)!
Contact me here for 1:1 consulting on topics related to my past industry research experiences and/or my current research in academia.
Contact me here if you would like me to complete an end-to-end industry research project. For reference, projects I take on typically lead to patents and/or papers.
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