In the seventh episode of Deep Neural Notebooks, I interview Shimon Whiteson.  Shimon sir is a Computer Science Professor at the University of Oxford, where he leads the Whiteson Research Lab. He is also a Data Scientist at Waymo (formerly the Google Self Driving Car Project). His research specialises in Reinforcement Learning (RL), Cooperative Multi-Agent RL, to be precise.   So this interview is all in the context of Reinforcement Learning. We talk about his journey  - how he started with Machine Learning & RL. I ask him about his thoughts on the state of RL - about how the field has progressed and changed since he started, about how it has become so popular in the last few years, and about the challenges being faced.  We also talk about his research at Waymo, about recent projects from his lab, and about the scope and future of telepresence robots, one of which was developed under his guidance. We also talk about the infamous Reward Hypothesis in the context of RL and Philosophy. In the end, he also shares some advice for people starting out with RL.  Links:  - Shimon Whiteson: https://twitter.com/shimon8282 - Whiteson Research Lab (WhiRL): http://whirl.cs.ox.ac.uk/ - Teresa Robot: https://whirl.cs.ox.ac.uk/teresa/ - RL workshop at Machine Learning Summer School, Moscow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAw0Chs7QKA - The Reward Hypothesis: http://incompleteideas.net/rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rewardhypothesis.htmlTimestamps:Podcast links :Youtube: https://youtu.be/bbrYZDgPI9MApple Podcasts:  https://apple.co/2TLUZ0yGoogle Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2TIyvh6Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/episode/3936aEvSwsIhfwQfURmDb9Anchor: https://bit.ly/3gpMi65Connect:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkulkhanna Website: https://mukulkhanna.co LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mukulkhanna/