BSc and Direct PhD in Electrical Engineering at the Technion.
Participated in the Excellence Program: 2008-2011.
As a student in the Program, Assaf took many courses from the mathematics and industrial engineering faculties. In addition, he began taking advanced courses in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering early in his degree program. The program was very helpful for Assaf in resolving numerous bureaucratic difficulties, such as the number of points per semester, enrolling in courses from all faculties at irregular times during the semester, and having a very helpful academic advisor. After his Bachelor's degree, Assaf continued on pursuing his PhD in the field of machine learning and reinforcement learning, focusing on the subject of off-line policy evaluation in dynamical systems.
Recommendations for Program participants: "First of all – find a good advisor that you can rely on to back you up in any student request, and that can pinpoint the right courses for you. Then you should exploit as much as you can the academic freedom from the program – build your own study program, replace boring courses with interesting ones, don’t be shy to go to advanced studies or other faculties."
Publications:
A. Hallak, S. Mannor and D. Di-Castro, Model Selection in Markovian Processes, KDD'13
G. Theocharous, A. Hallak, Lifetime Value Marketing using Reinforcement Learning, RLDM'13
A. Hallak, D. Di-Castro, S. Mannor, Contextual Markov Decision Processes, EWRL'15
A. Hallak, F. Schnitzler , T. Mann, S. Mannor, Off-policy Model-based Learning under
Unknown Factored Dynamics, ICML'15
A. Hallak, A. Tamar , R. Munos, S. Mannor, Generalized Emphatic Temporal Difference
Learning: Bias-Variance Analysis, AAAI'16
A. Hallak, S. Mannor, Consistent On-Line Off-Policy Evaluation, EWRL'16
A. Hallak, E. Yom-Tov, Y. Mansour, Automatic Representation for Lifetime Value Recommender Systems, EWRL'16