I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute. Previously I was an Applied Research Scientist at Element AI.  I am interested in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of automated planning, heuristic search, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, and game-playing agents. 

Contact me at x@torontomu.ca where x=rick.valenzano (ie. replace "x" with "rick.valenzano" without the quotation marks). Try and grab that email address, you meddling spambots.

You can also find me on LinkedIn.

News

August 2023 - Reward Machines paper won the 2023 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize

August 2023 - Paper on Learning Reward Machines published in AIJ

June 2023 - Named as a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute

January 2023 - Teaching a first-year class on programming at Toronto Metropolitan University

September 2022 - I have been named as a distinguished PC Member for IJCAI-ECAI for being in the top 3% of reviewers

September 2022 - Teaching a grad class on Heuristic Search at Toronto Metropolitan University

September 2022 - Teaching a third year class on Artificial Intelligence at Toronto Metropolitan University

January 2022 - Teaching a first-year class at Toronto Metropolitan University

January 2022 - Teaching a grad class on Heuristic Search at Toronto Metropolitan University

January 2022 - Paper on Reward Machines published in JAIR

August 2021 - Paper appearing at IJCAI on incorporating random exploration into bounded suboptimal search

January 2021 - Starting as an Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University University

February 2020 - Teaching a course on Reinforcement Learning for the Queen's Master of Management in AI Program.