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CS885 Winter 2022 - Reinforcement Learning

Instructor: Pascal Poupart (ppoupart [at] uwaterloo [dot] ca)

Piazza: piazza.com/uwaterloo.ca/winter2022/cs885

Interactive sessions (via LEARN Bongo until Feb 4 and in AL211 thereafter): Mondays & Wednesdays 10 - 11:20 am (an external link for the LEARN Bongo online discussions will be posted in Piazza and accessible by all students, even if you cannot enroll yet)

Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays 4-5 pm. Book a 15-minute one-on-one meeting with Pascal via Calendly. The online meeting will be done with LEARN Bongo until Feb 4. Afterwards, you can choose to meet Pascal in person in DC2514 or online via Bongo. Please indicate your choice when booking the meeting via Calendly.

Teaching Assistants:

Course format: The course will follow a "flipped" format. This means that there are no live lectures. Lectures are pre-recorded and made available in the form of slides and videos available on this website. In the schedule, you are expected to watch and understand the videos assigned each week by that week. Two interactive sessions are scheduled each week for discussions. Pascal will not be lecturing in those sessions. Instead Pascal will hold QA (question-answer) sessions about the material of the course in the first half of the term and discussion sessions about a set of papers in the second half of the course.

Slides and Videos: Checkout the schedule. Each week you are expected to watch and understand the videos scheduled in that week. For the first week, you must watch the videos scheduled for Jan 3-7. Since Pascal taught the same course in 2018, 2020 and 2021, we will re-use some of the video-lectures recorded in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The fundamental concepts have not changed. However, the schedule has been updated to include new advances that became important recently. Pascal will pre-record and post new videos for some of the topics that do not already have a video-lecture from 2018, 2020 or 2021.

Interactive sessions (Mondays and Wednesdays 10-11:20 am Eastern time): The first session will be on Wednesday January 5. In the first half of the course, Pascal will conduct QA (question-answer) sessions about the material assigned each week in that week. In the second half of the course, the interactive sessions will be used to discuss a set of papers. Each session will be recorded and posted in LEARN. We will use the Bongo virtual classroom system in LEARN until February 4 and then we will meet in person in AL211 thereafter. We will follow the guidelines of the university for in-person sessions. If you cannot enroll in the course yet, you can still participate in the interactive sessions: an external link for each interactive session will be posted in Piazza.