Alyssa Li Dayan – 2023 Wonderfest Science Envoy

Alyssa Li Dayan is a third year AI PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Stuart Russell. She was previously a research scientist at Uber ATG working on simulation and prediction for autonomous vehicles, and received her BS in mathematics with computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. She is interested in AI systems that can continually learn through intrinsic motivation and building up reusable abstractions. She is currently working on discovering and reasoning over entities from pixels, understanding reward shaping through a Bayesian perspective, and skill discovery using description length objectives.