I am currently an applied researcher at Expedia Group, where I develop machine learning algorithms for complex problems in marketing and advertising domains such as real-time bidding in Google Hotel Ads. I have a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of California, Merced . In my Ph.D. dissertation , I studied methods for learning representations in reinforcement learning as well as numerical optimization methods based on quasi-Newton approach for deep learning and
[17] Jacob Rafati, and Roummel F. Marcia (2020). Quasi-Newton Optimization Methods For Deep Learning Applications. Published as a chapter in Deep Learning Applications book, Springer.
[16] Jacob Rafati, and David C. Noelle (2019). Efficient Exploration through Intrinsic Motivation Learning for Unsupervised Subgoal Discovery in Model-Free Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning. arXiv e-print (arXiv:1911.10164) .