Tom Schaul
Senior Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Schaul is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind with 18 years of experience advancing modular reinforcement learning, black-box optimization, and recurrent neural networks across domains from vision and neural decoding to games and robotics. He holds an MSc from EPFL and a PhD from TU Munich under Jürgen Schmidhuber, followed by a postdoc with Yann LeCun at NYU, a trajectory that blends deep theoretical foundations with high-impact industry research. At DeepMind since 2013 he has progressed through research ranks, driving work on meta-learning and artificial curiosity while maintaining hands-on coding contributions to open-source projects like PyBrain. Based in London and originally from Luxembourg, he combines a European academic pedigree with practical experience in production-scale AI research teams. An underappreciated thread in his profile is sustained focus on modularity—structuring learning systems so they generalize and adapt—which informs both his research and engineering decisions.
18 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
University of WaterlooMSc, MSc at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)Dr. rer. nat., Dr. rer. nat. at Technische Universität München / Technical University of MunichMSc, MSc at Columbia UniversityBaccalaureate, Baccalaureate at Lycée Classique Diekirch
French, German, Luxembourgish, English, Italian
Stackoverflow
1,021reputation
26kreached
10answers
1question
neural-network
top-5%
Github Skills (13)
python10
neural-network9
logging9
debug8
debugging8
tic-tac-toe6
artificial-intelligence6
sequential6
optimization6
genetic-programming6
classification6
serialization6
pickle6
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
pybrain/pybrain
Apr 2008 - Dec 2017
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 402 commits, 15 PRs in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Tom's commits focused on reducing logging messages and warnings within the PyBrain library. They made file-related modifications in the pybrain/utilities.py and pybrain/tools.py files. Their work involved the development of utility functions.
schaul/py-vgdl
Jun 2012 - Jun 2019
A video game description language (VGDL) built on top pf pygame.
Contributions:261 commits, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 7 years 1 month
pythonpygamegame-developmentvideo-gamevideo
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