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In episode 52 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Marc Bellemare.

Professor Bellemare leads the reinforcement learning efforts at Google Brain Montréal and is a core industry member at Mila, where he also holds the Canada CIFAR AI Chair. His PhD work, completed at the University of Alberta, proposed the use of Atari 2600 video games to benchmark progress in reinforcement learning (RL). He was a research scientist at DeepMind from 2013-2017, and his Arcade Learning Environment was very influential in DeepMind’s early RL research and remains one of the most widely-used RL benchmarks today. More recently he collaborated with Loon to deploy deep reinforcement learning to navigate stratospheric balloons. His book on distributional reinforcement learning, published by MIT Press, will be available in Spring 2023.