Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán

Bio

Born in Guadalajara, a city that nowadays has over 4 million people, I spent my first 18 years there.

After that I went to live to Guanajuato, a quiet, colonial city with barely over 100 thousand people at the time. Why did I go to such a small place after living on a big city? Well, the reason is not because I wanted a quiet place to study or anything that romantic. Apparently, however, some mathematics and computer science researchers did think that way, because they founded the Center for Mathematical Research (CIMAT) in that city. This research center is on of Mexico's top programs for mathematics and computer science with a range of diverse and high quality professors.

I have a bachelors in math, done in a cooperative program between the University of Guanajuato and CIMAT. It is a top 5 program for mathematics in México, if not the best. I spent 5 long but happy years there and finally got my degree with a thesis in fair division, a branch of game theory.

The year after my Bs. Sc. was the first year the express masters program was approved in CIMAT. It consists in a full length 2-years Ms. Sc. done in only 1 year. So I took advantage of that and got my degree with a thesis in heuristic methods for constrained optimization using Baldwinian Evolutionary Algorithms.

For my doctoral studies, I went to The University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I studied computer science under the wonderful advising of Michael Vose. At the same time, I worked as a research assistant for Sergey Gavrilets on modeling evolutionary biology. This exciting work introduced me to the beauty of theoretical biology, and convinced me to pursue a carrer in it. My dissertation was a multidisciplinary work on biological simulations as well as theoretical and practical natural computation.

I am currently a Research Engineer at DeepMind working on Multi-Agent reinforcement learning. Particularly studying the emergence of cooperation among intelligent agents.