The ‘OpenAI Gym’ Workshop— Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcement Learning in Python was held on Thursday, September 19th, 2019, from 6:00 – 7:00 pm in 102 Leonhard building. This workshop is presented by Juxihong Julaiti, a Ph.D. candidate and a research assistant in LISA lab at Penn State IME department. He is the former president of INFORMS Penn State Chapter and he also worked as a data scientist in Cpnet.io and Te Connectivity.

Juxihong started by explaining the main components of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and provided real-world applications of RL. Then, he described the importance of using Gym for RL implementation in both theory and industry. The implementation demo was done for a Taxi example in Python. During this demo, a baseline with simulation, Cross-Entropy Methods (CEM) and Deep CEM was presented. The students learned how to start implementing RL models by importing Gym as a library in Python.