Aidan Scannell

Hello, I’m Aidan, a researcher working at the intersection of machine learning, sequential decision-making, and embodied AI. My research is driven by the goal of building autonomous agents that can learn and generalize behaviours across a wide range of tasks. I’m particularly interested in methods and architectures for learning world models, and in understanding how agents can leverage them to solve new tasks efficiently.

Bio:

I’m a Research Scientist at TRI working on world models, and how they can be used for policy learning and evaluation. Previously, I was a Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh in The Bayesian and Neural Systems Group working with Amos Storkey and Peter Bell. Before that, I was a Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, where I led FCAI’s Long Term Decision-Making team, whilst sitting in Joni Pajarinen’s Robot Learning Lab and Arno Solin’s Machine Learning Research Group. I obtained my PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Arthur Richards and Carl Henrik Ek. During my PhD I developed methods for controlling quadcopters in uncertain environments by synergising methods from probabilistic machine learning, stochastic differential geometry and reinforcement learning.