About. I’m an AI researcher with wide-ranging interest across AI and machine learning. I am based at Microsoft Research in the Game Intelligence team.

Previous. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge, spending time at the Alan Turing Institute, and then did a postdoc at Tsinghua University. In my previous life I qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Ernst & Young (EY), building forecasting and valuation models for clients across London finance. I also spent one year in Taiwan studying 中文.

Research. I have deep expertise in imitation learning, world modeling, generative modeling, and uncertainty estimation. Whilst my PhD centered around Bayesian deep learning (e.g. ensembling and priors), recently I have focused on applying ideas from generative modeling to RL-type settings (e.g. using diffusion to imitate humans). My work on behavioral cloning for video games has been widely shared.

My research aims to build and understand AI systems that are scalable, robust and human-like. My philosophy incorporates several elements. 1) I adopt a probabilistic view of neural networks to help understand today’s algorithms and design those of tomorrow. 2) I believe that the agent-environment framework, with sequential decisions and interactive learning, is the correct setting to be studying to make long-term progress in AI. 3) My research places equal weighting on theory and empirics.

Get in Touch. If you’d like to chat about research, collaborating together, or other opportunities, reach me via email at $x$@microsoft.com, where, $x=\text{tim.pearce}$. I’m more active on Twitter than here, so for up-to-date news, follow me.

Outreach. I set aside one hour each week to support underrepresented groups doing AI research (in any sense; age, finances, gender, nationality, race etc). I’m happy to provide project advice, research talks, career chats, adhoc teaching… or anything else that is helpful. Please fill in this contact form if you’d like to chat ☺️.

UPDATE: I’ll run these sessions until end of April 2024, after which I’ll be continuing my outreach efforts in a new format.

News

  • July 2023. Giving a talk at QMU’s Game AI group. 👾
  • June 2023. Co-organizing Summer School on AI and Games.
  • June 2023. Traveling to Manchester Unveristy to give a keynote at Advances in Data Science and AI Conference.
  • May 2023. Heading to Rwanda for ICLR! ✈️
  • Jan 2023. 1x ICLR paper accepted. 💫
  • Jan 2023. Giving a talk at Tsinghua TSAIL group on diffusion models for imitation learning.
  • Dec 2022. Attending NeurIPS to present my paper on censored quantile regression neural networks.
  • July 2022. My paper on behavioural cloning for counter-strike won best paper at IEEE CoG.
  • May 2022. I will be joining Microsoft Research as an AI researcher.

Misc Resources