Stephan Zheng

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Stephan Zheng is a Lead Research Scientist and heads the AI Economist team at Salesforce Research. He currently works on using deep reinforcement learning and economic simulations to design economic policy. His work has been widely covered in the media, including the Financial Times, Axios, Forbes, Zeit, Volkskrant, MIT Tech Review, and others. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech (2018), where he worked on imitation learning of NBA basketball players and neural network robustness, amongst others. He was twice a research intern with Google Research and Google Brain. Before machine learning, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, and Utrecht University. He received the Lorenz graduation prize from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his master’s thesis on exotic dualities in topological string theory and was twice awarded the Dutch national Huygens scholarship.