Peter Henderson

I'm an assistant professor at Princeton University, leading the Polaris Lab.

Areas of interest:

I care about building deep reinforcement learning agents that matter: those that help us solve major challenges for the public good, reliably, safely, and semi-autonomously. Recently, I'm excited using RL for discovery (e.g., information-seeking agents) and strategic-decision making.
I also care a lot about shaping the law to make the United States ready for a post-AGI world.

I'm looking for:

Cracked RL engineers/researchers for a stealth effort (DM me on X or Bluesky!)
Students and postdocs to join Polaris Lab (PhD/Postdoc expression of interest; Undergrad/MSE expression of interest). (I'll do my best to get back to you but can't make any promises due to the large volume of emails I receive.)
Great seed investments in new AI-first companies (DM me on X or Bluesky with the pitch!)

Some things I did before:

Launched products at Amazon and AWS.
Did research at Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR).
Got my JD & PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, with the great Dan Jurafsky.
Did RL Research at McGill & Mila with David Meger & Joelle Pineau.
Worked at the California Supreme Court with Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar; led the Domestic Violence Pro Bono Project at Stanford Law School.

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