David Ireland
David is a PhD student working under the supervision of Professor Giovanni Montana in Warwick Manufacturing Group. David has a background in Mathematics and Statistics, having completed a BSc in the former and an MSc in the latter from Lancaster University. His MSc thesis was titled ‘Multi-armed bandits and their applications in clinical trials’ which lead to developing an interest in Reinforcement Learning, which is the topic of his PhD.
As part of the SUSTAIN project David will be looking to apply Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to Combinatorial Optimisation problems – problems which are traditionally very computationally expensive and time consuming to solve, and which require solving every time the data changed. The idea is to be able to apply DRL to problems of these nature to obtain fast, generalisable solvers that can be obtain an approximate solution in a fraction of the time and be applied to unseen instances of the problem.