About Me

I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

I currently work in Prof. Sergey Levine's lab as an undergraduate researcher, working on model-based reinforcement learning together with my mentors Roberto Calandra and Rowan McAllister.

My interests include reinforcement learning, machine learning, as well as pure mathematics.

I will be TAing once again for EECS 126, an upper-division course on probability and random processes, this upcoming spring semester!

You may reach me at kchua (at) berkeley (dot) edu.

Publications

• Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models.
  arXiv | website | code
  Kurtland Chua, Roberto Calandra, Rowan McAllister, Sergey Levine.
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference 2018 (Spotlight presentation, ~4% of accepted papers).
  ICML 2018 Workshop on Planning and Learning (Oral presentation).
  ICML 2018 Workshop on Prediction and Generative Modeling in Reinforcement Learning.

Talks

• “Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models.” Bay Area Machine Learning Symposium (Baylearn). October 2018.

Honors

• NVIDIA Pioneer Award (2018). Awarded for Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models at NeurIPS 2018.
• Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society (2018). Inducted as a junior.
• Dean’s Honors List for Fall ‘15, Spring ‘16, Fall ‘16, Spring ‘17, Spring ‘18.
• Quantedge Award for Academic Excellence (2018). Awarded to students of senior standing with a 4.0 GPA.
• Kraft Award for Freshmen (2015). Awarded to students who earn a 4.0 GPA during their first semester at UC Berkeley.