Tyler Clark MINDS CDT, 2022

Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton

Tyler Clark is a doctoral researcher working on deep reinforcement learning, a branch of AI that learns through trial and error. It is used in applications ranging from robotics to game-playing, but the computing demands of getting the best results have long been a barrier for researchers without access to expensive data centre infrastructure.

Tyler's work challenges that assumption directly. His research demonstrates that it is possible to achieve the highest levels of performance in deep reinforcement learning using a standard desktop PC, removing the dependence on large-scale computing resources that has made cutting-edge work in this area inaccessible to many. That matters not just for cost and convenience, but for energy consumption and for opening the field to a wider community of researchers and developers who want to experiment, build and push the work further.

His paper, Beyond The Rainbow: High Performance Deep Reinforcement Learning on a Desktop PC, was published at ICML 2025, one of the most competitive machine learning conferences in the world. He also shares research ideas through his YouTube channel, AI Tango, bringing technical work to a broader audience.

He is due to graduate in 2026.