David Silver | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1976 (age 48–49) |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA) University of Alberta (PhD) |
| Known for | AlphaGo AlphaZero AlphaStar |
| Awards | Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2011) ACM Prize in Computing (2019) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial intelligence Machine learning Reinforcement learning Planning Computer Games[1] |
| Institutions | Google Deepmind University College London Elixir Studios |
| Thesis | Reinforcement learning and simulation-based search in computer Go (2009) |
| Website | www |
David Silver (born 1976) is a principal research scientist atGoogle DeepMind and a professor atUniversity College London. He has led research onreinforcement learning withAlphaGo,AlphaZero and co-lead onAlphaStar.[1][2]
He studied atChrist's College, Cambridge,[3] graduating in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award, and having befriendedDemis Hassabis whilst at Cambridge.[4] Silver returned to academia in 2004 at theUniversity of Alberta to study for aPhD onreinforcement learning,[5] where he co-introduced the algorithms used in the first master-level 9×9Go programs and graduated in 2009.[6][7] His version of programMoGo (co-authored with Sylvain Gelly) was one of the strongest Go programs as of 2009.[8]
After graduating from university, Silver co-founded the video games companyElixir Studios, where he was CTO and lead programmer, receiving several awards for technology and innovation.[4][9]
Silver was awarded aRoyal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011, and subsequently became alecturer atUniversity College London.[10] His lectures on Reinforcement Learning are available on YouTube.[11] Silver consulted forGoogle DeepMind from its inception, joining full-time in 2013.
His recent work has focused on combiningreinforcement learning withdeep learning, including a program that learns to playAtari games directly from pixels.[12] Silver led the AlphaGo project, culminating in the first program to defeat a top professional player in the full-size game of Go.[13]AlphaGo subsequently received an honorary 9 Dan Professional Certification; and won theCannes Lion award for innovation.[14] He then led development ofAlphaZero, which used the same AI to learn to play Go from scratch (learning only by playing itself and not from human games) before learning to playchess andshogi in the same way, to higher levels than any other computer program.
Silver is among the most published members of staff at Google DeepMind, with over 200,000 citations and has anh-index of 97 according toGoogle Scholar.[1]
Silver was awarded the 2019ACM Prize in Computing for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing.[15]
In 2021, Silver was electedFellow of the Royal Society (FRS) for his contributions toDeep Q-Networks andAlphaGo.[16] He was elected a Fellow of theAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2022.[17]