Jennifer Barnes-Nunn 

Jennifer Barnes-Nunn is a student in the MINDS Centre for Doctoral Training programme at the University of Southampton. She received a BSc and MPhys in Physics from the University of Warwick in 2017 and a Postgraduate Certificate in Data Science from the University of Bath in 2018. In 2020, she worked on a project with the Hertie School in Berlin to understand how the spread of COVID-19 is modelled and help to bring a scientific understanding of epidemiological modelling to a wider audience. Also in 2020, she worked with researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to develop novel knapsack methods for resource allocation problems such as assigning housing to homeless youth. She is currently in her first year of research in the doctoral training programme, working with Dr Yali Du, Dr Bing Chu and Professor Tim Norman.

Her work focuses on communication networks in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and distributed deep reinforcement learning (DDRL). Her general aim is to use scientific knowledge of human and animal interactions to inform the way we train and deploy systems of artificial intelligence.