Curriculum Vitae


Higher education

2017-Today
P.hD. Candidate - Electrical Engineering
Technion Institute of Technology, Israel

  • Specialization in Reinforcement Learning, supervised by Prof. Shie Mannor

2017-2019
M.Sc. - Electrical Engineering
Technion Institute of Technology, Israel

  • Specialization in Reinforcement Learning, supervised by Prof. Shie Mannor

2014–2017
B.Sc. (cum laude) - Electrical Engineering
Technion Institute of Technology, Israel

  • Research oriented EE faculty excellence program (EMET)
  • Specialized in Machine Learning

2009–2012
B.A. - Information Technologies
Ben-Gurion University, Israel

  • Conducted during mandatory army service

Professional

2020
Research Internship in Reinforcement Learning for Congestion Control
Nvidia AI Research

  • My internship was a joint project with Mellanox.
  • Mellanox provides network interface cards (NIC) and switches for datacenters and high performance computers.
  • One of the major obstacles in such systems is to prevent network congestion due to multiple servers sending at an overwhelming rate.
  • By tackling this problem with reinforcement learning, we learned an adaptive congestion control policy and improved performance across several metrics (such as fairness) when comparing to previous works.

2019-Today
Site Administrator
Technion Reinforcement Learning Website $(RL)^2$

  • In order to improve the visibility of the Reinforcement Learning research at the Technion I created and actively maintain the Reinforcement Learning Research Labs - $(RL)^2$ site and corresponding social media accounts. These mediums combine the various RL research labs at the Technion, highlighting the impressive research that they perform.
  • For more information see: rlrl.net.technion.ac.il

2018-Today
Project Supervisor
Reinforcement Learning Lab

  • I currently lead the undergraduate RL projects lab, a lab founded by Tom Zahavy and Daniel J. Mankowitz.
  • The projects are research oriented, in the sense that if we had more time these are viable research directions which we would pursue ourselves.
  • Our projects have been accepted to leading conferences and workshops.
  • Additional information: chentessler.wixsite.com/projects-lab

2017
Research Internship in Machine Learning, Dialogue systems
Google AI Research

  • Focused on using deep recurrent neural networks for natural language generation. The team I interned at worked on implementing a hierarchical chat-bot composed of multiple skills.
  • My project was to train a deep neural network as one of these skills such that it will help advance the conversation in a more human-like way - an element also known as a ‘chit-chat’ bot.

2015-2017
Performance Verification
Mellanox Technologies Chip Design

  • Job entailed: Micro-architecture, pre/post silicon verification, complementary tool development.
  • The Performance team specializes in understanding unique features and flows and what performance to expect. Due to being the group with the most extensive knowledge, performance related, we deviated into micro-architecture and post-silicon verification.
  • While working at Mellanox, I created the ‘Performance Calculator’, for which I won the 1st place at the ‘David Cohn Corporate Entrepreneurship Award’.

Reviewing

AISTATS 2020; ICLR 2020; NeurIPS 2019, 2020; ICML 2020;
UAI 2020; JMLR 2019, 2020; COLT 2018


Achievements

2020
Young Researchers Scholarship, Artificial Intelligence (Future category)
Dan David Foundation

  • The Dan David Prize is a global scholarship attributed to promising researchers in the various fields. I am one of the recipients for the 2020 scholarship in the field of artificial intelligence (future category).
  • https://www.dandavidprize.org/scholars/2020

2017
Meyer foundation fellowship for graduate studies
Technion Institute of Technology

2017
1st place - Yehoraz Kasher Competition
Technion Institute of Technology

  • ‘Best project’ award for ‘A Deep Hierarchical Approach to Lifelong Learning in Minecraft’.
  • This competition is between all B.Sc. projects conducted under the faculty of Electrical Engineering in 2017.

2016
1st place - David Cohn Corporate Entrepreneurship Award
Technion Institute of Technology

  • Awarded first place for creating the ‘Performance Calculator’ used in Mellanox.
  • The David Cohn award is given to a B.Sc. student which has presented entrepreneurial work in the industry.