Gerry Tesauro, PhD

Gerald “Gerry” Tesauro is a Principal Research Staff Member in AI Science at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center.

Gerry is best known for developing TD-Gammon, a self-teaching neural network that learned to play backgammon at human world championship level, and for developing advanced methods for game strategy decisions in Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy! supercomputer. He has also worked on theoretical and applied machine learning in a wide variety of other settings, including multi-agent learning, dimensionality reduction, computer virus recognition, computer chess (Deep Blue), intelligent e-commerce agents and autonomic computing. Gerry has been extensively involved in organizing AI-related conferences and workshops. Most notably, he has served as Program Chair, General Chair, Workshops Chair, and Tutorials Chair of NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), in addition to many years of service on the NeurIPS Organizing Committee.

Jerry is a member of the Board of Directors of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation and an Associate Editor of the ICGA (Intl. Computer Games Assn.) Journal.