Dane Malenfant

I am a member of the Learning in Neural Circuits (LiNC) Lab where I am advised by Dr. Blake Richards. In the recent past, I graduated with a B.A in Computer Science with Psychology from McGill University (Tiohtià:ke). Before that, a Certificate in French as a Second Language from the University of Regina (Oskana kā-asastēki).

I am very adventurous and enjoy being challenged. As consequence, my research interests gravitate towards what I find challenging. This is a core reason why I am in artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, I have become interested in reinforcement learning agents, improving sample efficiency and out of distribution generalization, and modelling cognitive, psychological and neuroscientific concepts in its literature.

There is also the intersection of traditional Indigenous knowledge and AI that I aim to represent in machine learning non-superficially. I strongly believe that non-Occidental scientific perspectives will at the least propose novel intriguing problems. Hopefully they will also offer more solutions to benefit the current understanding of models.

My current projects involve long-term credit assignment and multi-agent reinforcement learning with respect to more natural problems/tasks/environments that biological systems seemingly solve effortlessly and anything aforementioned.

During my undergraduate studies, I was privileged to be apart of the Canadian chapter of Encode Justice and McGill’s NeuroTech team. I also collaborated with Indigenous initiatives with AI for Humanity.

Outside of research I enjoy attending niche music events and trick-collecting card games.

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