Ryan Strauss

I am currently an Applied Scientist at Amazon with the Sponsored Products team. My research interests involve machine learning, in particular reinforcement learning and generative modeling. I have worked on several research projects in these areas as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as an undergraduate at Davidson College.

At UNC, I worked with Junier Oliva as part of the LUPA Lab to develop systems that can deal with incomplete information and reason about how to acquire missing information. During my time at Davidson, I was fortunate enough to work on several research projects with Professors Raghu Ramanujan, Michelle Kuchera, Tabitha Peck, and Bryce Wiedenbeck. These projects included supervised and unsupervised learning methods for nuclear physics applications, reinforcement learning for applications in virtual reality, and an undergraduate Honors thesis with a focus on multi-task reinforcement learning.