MINDS DCDT student educating developers on reinforcement learning at FOSDEM 2024

MINDS CDT student, Kryspin Varys, gave an educational talk at the FOSDEM 2024 conference on the topic of safe reinforcement learning. FOSDEM (Free Open Source Developers’ European Meeting) is one of the largest European conferences aimed at recent developments in the space of open-source software. It is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open-source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. This year it was attended by more than 10 000 open-source and software development professionals and enthusiasts.

Embecosm organised a Dev room to showcase open source in AI/ML and invited Kryspin to give a tutorial on reinforcement learning. The motivation for this talk was to teach non-expert audiences, such as students, programmers and IT professionals about reinforcement learning. In his presentation Kryspin explained what reinforcement learning is and how we can implement it, why is safety in reinforcement learning important and finally how to achieve it. This gave Kryspin a unique opportunity to practice his presentation and public speaking skills in front of several hundred people. William Jones from Embecosm commented: “Our track was highly popular, and in a packed lecture theatre with a 500+ capacity Kryspin’s talk was very well received, and he did a great job fielding questions.”

Please view the recorded presentation of the talk.

An integral part of the MINDS CDT programme are regular trainings in public speaking and presentation delivery. MINDS CDT organizes three events a year where students engage in public speaking:

• a mock-up internal conference where students make 5–10-minute presentations of their research
• a poster session where students make posters and engage with university partners from the industry
• a week-long team building, which includes a three-day hackathon where groups of students present their final products

Furthermore, the MINDS CDT students are expected to carry out an outreach activity every year at which they represent the university and educate the public about the latest developments in science and engineering. This motivated Kryspin to talk about safe reinforcement learning - a field connected to his research on value-alignment.

Although, Kryspin hasn't spoken in front of a crowd of this size before, he feels he benefited from these MINDS CDT trainings: “I learned how to prepare presentations targeting an audience outside of one's field. Furthermore, thanks to these trainings I also gained the necessary confidence.”