2. Forrest Laine: Computational Game Theory, Optimization, Autonomous Vehicles

This is a conversation with Dr. Forrest Laine, a tenure-track professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University who studies computational game theory, optimization, reinforcement learning, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Laine's homepage: https://forrestlaine.github.io/

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Timestamps: 

[1:00 - 5:00] First computer interaction, intro to programming, game theory, and optimization

[6:00 - 11:30] Undergrad experiences, deciding to get a Ph.D.

[12:00 - 15:00] Working at Uber and Apple, formal exposure to optimization from "Nonlinear Programming" by Bertsekas 

[16:00 - 22:30] Falling in love with game theory, the relationship between optimization and game theory, mathematical models of decisions

[24:00 - 33:00] Expressivity vs. complexity in optimization, challenges of scaling game-theoretic models, the process of modeling a decision problem, theory vs. application

[34:00 - 42:00] Ingredients of autonomous vehicles, open problems in self-driving

[43:00 - 49:30] "more data, more compute" to improve state-of-the-art AI, humans as sources of uncertainty in games, (ir)rationality, flavors of optimization

[50:00 - 58:00] Reinforcement learning, AlphaTensor, derivative-free optimization

[58:45 - 1:02:30] Advice

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Music Credits:

Spring Flowers by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon

Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/

Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

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