Chris Nota
Founding Research Scientist at FM&M
Greater Boston United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Nota is a Founding Research Scientist and RL specialist with 12 years of experience building production-ready learning systems for robots and large-scale services. He holds a PhD in AI from UMass Amherst and has led impactful projects at iRobot—creating the core RL software suite used across product lines and cutting wheel-drop failures from 250k to under 50k monthly—plus practical innovations in partial observability and iterative offline RL for fleet learning. Chris pairs deep research (RL, SAC/PPO/DQN, VAEs) with hands-on engineering from his Cisco cloud and Adobe product work, making him fluent in taking algorithms from prototype to robust deployment. Currently based in Greater Boston, he moved from senior research roles into founding a research lab in 2024, signaling a shift toward shaping long-term RL strategy and productization. Notably, his iRobot work earned recognition at RLDM 2022, reflecting both technical novelty and applied impact.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic InstituteDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Artificial Intelligence, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Artificial Intelligence at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Github Skills (51)
pytorch10
utilities10
gymnasium10
sac10
deep-q-learning10
reinforcement-learning10
dqn10
dependency-free10
lodash10
ddpg10
deep-reinforcement-learning10
actor-critic10
q-learning10
optimization10
proximal-policy-optimization10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
jlubars/autonomous-learning-library
Feb 2020 - Jun 2020
Contributions:68 commits in 3 months
alexhaislip/autonomous-learning-library
Oct 2020 - Oct 2021
A PyTorch library for building deep reinforcement learning agents.
Contributions:49 commits in 1 year
pytorchdeep-learningreinforcement-learningagentsdeep-reinforcement-learning
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