Brad is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on the human side of reinforcement learning, and he’s received multiple best paper awards on this topic. Currently, he primarily focuses on how humans can specify reward functions that are aligned with their interests, and he also works on interactive machine learning and AI companionship. Brad co-leads UT Austin’s AI+Human Objectives Initiative (AHOI), a faculty group and talk series focused on AI alignment and safety. His dissertation on the TAMER framework comprised pioneering work on human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and it won the 2012 best dissertation award for the UT Austin Department of Computer Science. Before his current role at UT Austin, he was a postdoc at the MIT Media Lab; founded and sold his toy robotics startup Bots Alive; co-led the Bosch Learning Agents Lab at UT Austin; and was a Senior Research Scientist at Google.