Marc Bellemare
VP Modeling at Cohere
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMarc Bellemare is a deep reinforcement learning pioneer and entrepreneur with 13 years of experience bridging cutting-edge research and product-grade AI. As co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Reliant AI and an active leader at Cohere, he combines startup velocity with a research pedigree from DeepMind and Google. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Alberta and serves as an adjunct professor and Canada-CIFAR AI Chair across McGill, U. Montreal, and Mila, maintaining strong academic ties. Marc has contributed to foundational tools for RL research—such as commits improving the widely used Arcade Learning Environment—demonstrating hands-on systems work beyond theoretical advances. Known for translating deep RL breakthroughs into practical systems, he brings a rare mix of academic rigor, production engineering, and company-building. Based in Montreal, he frequently operates at the intersection of open-source infrastructure, industrial R&D, and AI strategy.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of AlbertaMaster of Science - MSc, Computer Science, Master of Science - MSc, Computer Science at McGill University
Github Skills (6)
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
sdl10
makefile9
build-system9
audio-processing8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Farama-Foundation/Arcade-Learning-Environment
Sep 2012 - Jan 2020
A simple framework that allows researchers and hobbyists to develop AI agents for Atari 2600 games
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 4 reviews, 288 commits in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Marc committed a new version of the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), suggesting a focus on improving the core functionality of the platform. The code changes reveal modifications to sound processing, specifically the implementation of an SDL audio interface. The user also addressed build issues, adding dependencies and modifying the makefiles for better compatibility.
ai-agent
mgbellemare/SkipCTS
May 2014 - Feb 2017
Skip Context Tree Switching - Reference Implementation
Contributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 5 pushes in 2 years 9 months
rustskipswitchingreference-implementation
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.