Step into the AI Era: Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop

We will do something different this time, a workshop, not a sprint.

By engaging the revolution of AI and deep learning, reinforcement learning also evolve from being able to solve simple game puzzles to beating human records in Atari games. It also opens the possibility of using reinforcement learning in making real life decisions. It’s time to do some serious DRL. (Or just play some games)

In this 3 hours workshop we would introduce some deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, as an exercise we will implementing them in python with deep learning libraries, specifically keras and tensorflow, to play games in Open AI Gym and simulated Atari.

In the first section, we will touch on the basic in reinforcement learning and implement using crossentropy method to play a simple games, on top of implement the basic tabular crossentropy method, we will also implement deep crossentropy method when the table which keep track of the policy becomes too large.

Most of the problem in the real world are model-free setting, i.e. we don’t know what the final result will be like for our intermediate actions. In the second section, we will introduce Q-learning and SARSA, two model-free policies which involve understanding of Bellman equations. We will also start introducing experience replay buffer which is essential to speed up learning.

In the last section, we will explore using DQN (Deep Q-Network), which is a network develop by Google Deep Mind involve using CNN as an agent to play Atari game. Experience replay buffer will also be implemented to speed up learning.

As the end of the workshop, participants should be able to understand the concept of the deep reinforcement learning algorithms that we covered, implement them in python with keras and tensorflow.

We expect the participants to have basic knowledge in deep learning. We will use Google Colab as environment for exercises so Google Account is needed.

As usual, we will give priority to join the sprint to the next people:

• Experienced open source contributors
• People from underrepresented minorities in our sprints

Agenda

• 6:00pm: Food and networking
• 6:30pm: Presentation of the sponsor
• 6:45pm: Start of the workshop

The day of the sprint

• Bring your own laptop if you can
• Join the Gitter channel of the sprint

Code of Conduct

• Please be reminded that all participants are expected to follow the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

Thanks to Ecom Recruitment for hosting this event!

ECOM is the digital talent brand of InterQuest Group. We have won the award for being LinkedIn’ most socially engaged staffing agency in 2016, 2017 and 2018. We operate at the forefront of digital transformation. We recruit the in-demand, technical skills that are shaping the new digital economy across analytics, information security, digital, information technology, networks & change management. We look to partner with our clients to bring optimized solutions to help them create opportunities for talented individuals across the verticals we serve.