I am an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (My IITM Page). I completed my Ph.D. at the Computer Science department of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I worked with Prof. Andrew G. Barto in the Autonomous Learning Laboratory, on Reinforcement Learning. My current research interests include finding better representational idioms, exploiting structure and symmetry of a problem and making connections between RL and classical AI.

I did my schooling in St. Bede's A.I.H.S.S, Madras. Graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai in 1993. Completed my Master's in Computer Science, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, under Prof. S. Sathiya Keerthi in the Intelligent Systems Lab.

Publications

• Ravindran, B. (2004) "An Algebraic Approach to Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning". Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA.

• Ravindran, B. and Barto, A. G. (2003) "Relativized Options: Choosing the Right Transformation". In the Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Machine Learning(ICML 2003), pp. 608-615. AAAI Press.

• Ravindran, B. and Barto, A. G. (2003) "SMDP Homomorphisms: An Algebraic Approach to Abstraction in Semi Markov Decision Processes". In the Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 03), pp. 1011-1016. AAAI Press.

• Ravindran, B. and Barto, A. G. (2003) "An Algebraic Approach to Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning". In the Proceedings of the Twelfth Yale Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems, pp. 109-114. Yale University.

• Ravindran, B. and Barto, A. G. (2002) "Model Minimization in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning". In the Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA 2002), pp.196-211, LNCS, Springer Verlag. (Slides from presentation: IE, Netscape, PPT)

• Ravindran, B. and Barto, A. G. (2001) "Symmetries and Model Minimization of Markov Decision Processes". Computer Science Technical Report 01-43, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.

• Sutton, R. S., Singh, S., Precup, D. and Ravindran, B. (1999) "Improved Switching among Temporally Abstract Actions". In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11 (Proceedings of NIPS'98), pp.1066-1072. MIT Press.

• McGovern, Amy , Precup, Doina, Ravindran, B., Singh, Satinder and Sutton, Richard S. (1998) " Hierarchical Optimal Control of MDPs", Proceedings of the Tenth Yale Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems, pp.186-191.

• Ravindran, B. (1996) "Solution of Delayed Reinforcement Learning Problems having Continuous Action Spaces", Master's Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

• Keerthi, S. S. and Ravindran, B. (1996) "C3: Reinforcement Learning". In Handbook Of Neural Computation, E. Fiesler and R. Beale, Editors, Oxford University Press, U. K.

• Keerthi, S. S. and Ravindran, B. (1994) "A Tutorial Survey Of Reinforcement Learning". In Sadhana (Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences), Vol. 19, Dec. 1994, pp. 851-889.