Ryan Bahlous-Boldi

My name is Ryan Bahlous-Boldi-or just Ryan Boldi, and I am a rising senior majoring in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am very interested in many different aspects of cognitive science, including Philosophy, Psychology, and of course, Artificial Intelligence. I have been actively conducting research in the fields of Evolutionary Computation, Reinforcement Learning, and more recently, Robotics. I want to study how intelligence emerged in our natural history, and try to use this knowledge to instill intelligence in machines. In essence, I hope to study the ways that evolution and learning created such a massive diversity of behaviors, brains and bodies on our planet so that we can use that to help us solve AI/ML/Robotics problems more robustly. A secondary goal is that we can learn more about what properties-e.g. open endedness of systems cater and support the emergence of generally intelligent behavior. On that note, I am very excited to work with Dr. Katia Sycara on Multi-Agent RL, Quality Diversity, and grounding of large language model-LLM communication this summer. We will be working on promoting communication amongst diverse agents cooperating to solve problems in complex RL domains.