My mentor for the summer is Professor Doina Precup of McGill University. She is part of the Department of Computer Science, and her area of interest is machine learning. For her research, she's interested in the learning problems that an agent faces in an unknown, complex environment, and looks to reinforcement learning to deal with these situations. Right now, some of her research is geared towards finding better knowledge representation methods for reinforcement learning agents.

Doina is a lot of fun to work with. A lot of students are doing research with her this summer, and there are a good number of PhD and graduate students as well. In total, I think we are about 15-20 students, which means that there's always someone to talk to, and everyone is working on something interesting. Doina makes time for each of us, and keeps up a great atmosphere. We even had a barbecue at her place, all of the students. Basically, Doina is a very friendly professor, and she shows us a lot of respect and consideration, and knows how to have fun too.