IIT Bombay Researcher Uses ML To Find Best Lockdown Policy

A team of researchers from IIT Bombay and Microsoft Research have used reinforcement learning to find approaches that would help figure out the right policies during lockdowns. The researchers have published their work in a paper titled ’ Optimizing Lockdown Policies for Epidemic Control using Reinforcement Learning’.  Reinforcement learning is a branch of AI that deals with teaching machines how to teach themselves. Just like a person learns to ride a bicycle by falling, the reinforcement learning algorithm contains agents that learn from rewards. These rewards are a bunch of mathematical expressions that are designed to make the RL agent do the most desirable task in as many steps as possible. Overview Of The Algorithm For finding optimal lockdown policies, the authors