About Me

My name is Tom Blau and I’m a machine learning researcher interested in using reinforcement learning to do something more valuable than just generating papers. I completed my Ph.D. at the university of Sydney in 2020, completing a thesis on reinforcement learning for robotics. One of the most striking lessons from my Ph.D. was the gap between state-of-the-art RL and actual, real-world applications that provide benefit to flesh-and-blood humans. Since then I have been working on RL solutions for real problems, with a current focus on Bayesian optimal design of experiments.

Research Interests

• Bayesian optimal design of experiments
• Reinforcement learning for biological molecules
• Neural likelihood estimation and conditional normalising flows

For a full curriculum vitae, see my LinkedIn page

For peer-reviewed work, see Publications