Martin Müller


	Martin Müller
	Professor, Dept. of Computing Science, University of Alberta DeepMind Chair in Artificial Intelligence Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii Amii Fellow Office: 345 Athabasca Email (in domain ualberta.ca): mmueller

Activities and Interests

Research - main areas: Monte Carlo and exact methods in game-tree search; exploration in heuristic search and machine learning; domain-independent classical planning; algorithms in combinatorial game theory.
- Research Group, current and previous members and visitors
Publications of my research group.
Some recent Talks from my group, on planning and games topics.
List of Courses I have taught.
Where I have lived and my work experience.
Misc

Ongoing/Upcoming

Teaching CMPUT 657 Heuristic Search, Modern and Traditional Techniques for Two Player Games.
Attend Problem Solving Club! Come learn and practice your algorithms, programming and problem-solving. You can participate in the Alberta provincial contest, the Rocky Mountain Regionals, the North America Championship, and the ACM-ICPC world finals! In any case, you are guaranteed to have fun and learn a lot. You can also take Cmput 403 - Practical Algorithmics for credit.

2023 News

Jan 20: Our paper "Replay Memory as An Empirical MDP: Combining Conservative Estimation with Experience Replay" was accepted to ICLR 2023. Congratulations Hongming!
Jan 9: Martin teaches a grad course CMPUT 657 this term,

2022 News

Dec 23 Martin's very intense teaching term is finally over. Taught two large classes, CMPUT 204 and CMPUT 455, with 450 students in total.
Oct 20 Our paper "Improving Search in Go Using Bounded Static Safety" has been accepted for presentation at CG2022. Congratulations Owen and Ting!
Oct 14: Zeyi passed his MSc defence! Congratulations Zeyi!
Aug 10: Bedir passed his MSc defence! Congratulations Bedir!
Aug 9: Asmaul Husna has joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Asmaul!
Jun 27: Chenjun passed his PhD defence! Congratulations Chenjun!
Jun 15: Our short paper "Supervised and Reinforcement Learning from Observations in Reconnaissance Blind Chess" has been accepted for IEEE COG 2022, the Conference on Games. Congratulations Timo!
May 1: Henry Du and Dat Tran joined our group as summer students. Welcome Henry and Dat!
Apr 21: Farnaz passed her MSc defence! Congratulations Farnaz!
Apr 20: Kiarash passed his MSc defence! Congratulations Kiarash!
Apr 7: last day of teaching for CMPUT 455 and 655
Mar 4: Ehsan Futuhi has joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Ehsan!
Winter 2022: teaching CMPUT 455 and CMPUT 655 - Algorithms in Combinatorial Game Theory

2021 News

Nov 20: First update to this webpage in a year and a half. A lot has happened in the meantime...
Nov 18: Rejwana passed her MSc defence! Congratulations Rejwana!
Nov 16: Rejwana gave her thesis seminar "On the Road to Perfection? Evaluating LeelaChess Zero Against Endgame Tablebases".
Nov 12: Chenjun gave the Department's Weekly AI Seminar about his ICML paper "On the Optimality of Batch Policy Optimization Algorithms".
Nov 1: Solimul passed his PhD defence! Congratulations Solimul! In January, he will start a postdoc at CMU with Marijn Heule.
Oct 18: Our paper "On the Road to Perfection? Evaluating LeelaChess Zero Against Endgame Tablebases" was accepted for the conference on Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2021), with some great reviews. Congratulations Rejwana and Ting!
Sep 15: Jiuqi Wang has joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Jiuqi!
Sep 2: Teaching Cmput 174 - Introduction to the Foundations of Computation I. Teaching in-person. Exciting and scary to be back in a real classroom.
Sep 1: Owen will stay in our group, but got "promoted" from undergrad to MSc student.
Aug 21: The attendees have voted, and our paper "Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking" has won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Games! Congratulations Timo!
Aug 17: Timo is presenting our paper "Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking" in the IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2021)
Aug 17-21: online-attending the IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2021)
Aug 9: Farnaz is starting a part-time internship with Huawei in Edmonton.
July 9: Solimul's SAT solver kissat_gb is based on Armin Biere's kissat system and is enhanced with several techniques developed by Solimul. It took third place in both SAT track and Main Track at the SAT Competition 2021. Congratulations Solimul!

End of June/early July: I finished my stay at JKU Linz, and my family and me returned to Edmonton. Quite a complicated trip with all the COVID rules and restrictions and mandatory quarantine.
June 21: Solimul is starting his internship at Amazon.
Jun 18: Our paper "A Comparison of Contextual and Non-Contextual Preference Ranking for Set Addition Problems" has been accepted to the ICML 2021 workshop on Subset Selection in Machine Learning: From Theory to Applications. Congratulations Timo!
May: Chenjun won an Outstanding Reviewer Award at ICLR 2021. Congratulations Chenjun!
May 21: Our paper "Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking" has been accepted for IEEE COG 2021, the Conference on Games. Congratulations Timo!
May 20: After two terms of online courses, Hongming has finally arrived in Edmonton! Welcome in-person Hongming!
May 1: Owen Randall is working on the Go solver project as a summer undergrad student, and will join our group as MSc in the fall. Welcome Owen!
April 28: Solimul is giving a talk (online) at Simons Institute at Berkeley, Theoretical Foundations of SAT/SMT Solving, on Boolean Satisfiability Extensions of CDCL Branching Heuristics by Exploration during Conflict Depression.
Feb 16: Solimul is giving an online seminar at the University of Waterloo on his work on expSAT.
Jan 29: Solimul was awarded the very competitive NSERC PDF (Postdoctoral Fellowship). Congratulations Solimul!
Jan 19: appointed as a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (CCAI) at Amii!
Jan 12: Got the NSERC Alliance grant!
Jan 11: Kiarash is starting a part-time internship with Huawei in Edmonton.

2020 News

Oct 7: Joining the seminar "Seminar in Computational Engineering - Puzzling Dancing Links" with Armin Biere and Juffi Fürnkranz.
Oct 1: I will be a Research Fellow at JKU Linz for the winter term 2020/21 and the summer term 2021. I am working with Juffi and his students on different topics in games and ML. With PhD student Timo Bertram we are looking at "drafting" or selecting cards in modern card games.
Sep 1: Hongming Zhang has joined our group as a new PhD student in the Statistical Machine Learning program. Welcome Hongming!
Sep 1: I am starting my one year sabbatical. I am spending most of it at Johannes Kepler Universität (JKU) Linz, working with Juffi Fürnkranz and Armin Biere.
Aug 26: Solimul was awarded an Ernst Mach grant from OeAD, the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research. This will cover the costs for a visit with Armin Biere in Linz to work on SAT. Congratulations Solimul!
June 26: Chenjun's paper "On the Global Convergence Rates of Softmax Policy Gradient Methods" with Jincheng Mei, Csaba Szepesvari and Dale Schuurmans was accepted for ICML 2020. Congratulations Chenjun!
June 24: Hongming Zhang of Peking University will join us as a PhD student in the fall. Welcome Hongming!
June 5: Amir Shukayev is leaving the group to start his internship at Jane Street Capital. Congratulations Amir!
May 1: Prateek Garg of IIT Delhi joins us (remotely) as a summer intern, working on MMCTS with Zeyi. Welcome Prateek!
May 1: Christian Jans starts with his NSERC USRA. Welcome Christian!
Apr 23: Finished online teaching and online final exams for Cmput 325 and 455. Thanks Ting for co-teaching 455 with me!
Apr 3: Chao submitted his PhD thesis Search and Learning Algorithms for Two-Player Games with Application to the Game of Hex.
Mar 26: Christian Jans received an NSERC USRA! He will join us this summer to work on the game of clobber. Congratulations Christian!
Mar 23: Chao passed his PhD defense! Congratulations Dr. Gao!
Feb 9/13: Solimul's AAAI oral presentation, and his paper in the news.
Jan 31: Our Undergraduate AI Society invited me to give a talk on "Computer Go - from the Beginnings to MuZero". Go check out their activities!
Jan 22: Farnaz Kohankhaki, Zeyi Wang and Kiarash Aghakasiri have joined our group as MSc students. Welcome Farnaz, Zeyi and Kiarash!
Jan 22: New on our research pages: a page about Yunpeng Tang's MSc work on algorithms for random sampling from time-changing discrete distributions, including a link to his thesis.
Jan 17: Bedir Tapkan has joined the Hex group led by Ryan Hayward as a MSc student, and I will co-supervise. Welcome Bedir!
Jan 14: Rejwana Haque has joined our group as a MSc student. Welcome Rejwana!
Jan 10: Amir Shukayev has joined our group as an undergraduate student. Welcome Amir!
Jan 7: a new term begins. I am teaching two large classes, Cmput 325, and 455 together with Ting.

Old news (up to 2019)

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Created: Aug 7, 2000 Last modified: see above

Martin Müller