Thiago D. Simão
PostDoc researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen

The Netherlands
I am Thiago. Currently, I am a PostDoc researcher with the Department of Software Science (SWS) at Radboud University Nijmegen advised by Dr. Nils Jansen. Previously, I was a Ph.D. candidate in the Algorithmics Group at Delft University of Technology, advised by Dr. Matthijs Spaan. Fore more details checkout my biography or my cv .
Research Interests: The motivation for my research revolves around making AI techniques more reliable, to enable their deployment in real-world applications. I focus on developing AI algorithms for scenarios with constrained interactions with an unknown environment. I am currently interested in safe reinforcement learning, a research topic concerned with problems where a minimum performance must be guaranteed and catastrophic events must be avoided.
Academic Service:
- Organization committee of the BeNeRL Workshop 2018.
- Local organizing committee of the 28th ICAPS.
- PC for ICML22, ICAPS22, AAAI21.
- Reviewer for JAAMAS, ICRA, AAAI and BRACIS.
Besides my professional activities, I like to run, play boardgames, listen to music and read.
news
2022
May
- Two papers presented at the ALA 2022 workshop on Safe Transfer in RL and Solving Hidden Parameter MDPs with Hindsight.
April
- Invited talk for the Oden Institute seminar at UT Austin.
- Talk at the LiVe-22 workshop about Safe Transfer in Reinforcement Learning.
March
- Talk at the ADML meetup about Ensuring Safety for Reinforcement Learning.
January
- I am serving as a PC member for ICML 2022.
2021
December
- Talk at the iVerif workshop on Safety Abstractions.
October
- I am serving as a PC member for the Planning and Learning track at ICAPS 2022.
August
- Talk at the PRL workshop.
- @ ICAPS-21 attending the mentoring program.
June
- Invited talk at the Center for Artificial Intelligence.
May
- @ AAMAS-21 presenting the AlwaysSafe paper.
March
- Talk at the LiVe-21 workshop about AlwaysSafe.
- Guest lecture on Safe RL at the Algorithms for Intelligent Decision Making course.
February
- Invited talk at the SWS-seminar about our AAMAS paper.
2020
December
- Our paper “AlwaysSafe: Reinforcement Learning Without Safety Constraint Violations During Training” was accepted at AAMAS-21.
- Our paper “WCSAC: Worst-Case Soft Actor Critic for Safety-Constrained Reinforcement Learning” was accpeted at AAAI-21.
September
- I am serving as a PC member for AAAI-21.
May
- @ AAMAS-20 presenting the paper Safe Policy Improvement with an Estimated Baseline Policy.
- Released gym-factored, a collection of factored environments that are OpenAI Gym compliant.
2019
August
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@ IJCAI-19 presenting our paper on structure learning for safe RL.
- @ IJCAI-19 participating on the doctoral consortium .
May
- Attending the conference RLDM-19.
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Starting my interniship at MSR Montreal with Romain Laroche and Remi Tachet des Combes.
- I got the prize for Best Poster in our department’s poster session.
March
- In Hilversum, presenting our work on reinforcement learning at the ICT.Open-19.
January
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@ AAAI-19 presenting our paper on safe policy improvement in factored environments.
2018
November
- I am co-organizing the Belgium Netherlands Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (BeNeRL-18).
October
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I am attending the 14th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL-18).
July
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I gave a contributed talk at the ICML-18 Workshop on Planning and Learning.
June
- I presented a poster at ICAPS-18.
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I am helping the local organizing committee of the ICAPS-18 at Delft.
- Attending the ICAPS-18 summer school at Noordwijk.
2017
November
- I presented a poster at the Energy Event promoted by the PowerWeb Institute.
October
- Presenting a poster at the EEMCS’s PhD Event.
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I attended the ACAI Summer School on Reinforcement Learning.
August
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I attended the 19th European Agent Systems Summer School.