My name is Kyriakos Efthymiadis, aka Kirk, and I am a research student in the Computer Science Department at the University of York. I am a member of the Artificial Intelligence Group and my supervisor is Dr. Daniel Kudenko.

I completed my undergraduate studies in the Department of Electronic Computing Systems at the TEI of Piraeus, Greece. There I had the opportunity to work on various aspects of Computer Science and Electronics ranging from Microelectronics and Signal Processing, to Databases and Software Engineering.

To further my learning in Computer Science, I secured admission in the highly reputable MSc in Software Engineering course at the Department of Computer Science, University of York. The course broadened my horizon on practical software engineering, software testing and software development which are very important aspects in all fields of Computer Science. I obtained the MSc in Software Engineering with distinction.

Despite having a software engineering background I have always been interested in Artificial Intelligence. During the last months of my MSc I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Daniel Kudenko on my thesis, Reinforcement Learning for Adversarial Tetris. The objective was to create a program, agent, that learns how to play the adversarial version of the Tetris game without any external help; kind of like a child when it plays on its own. I thoroughly enjoyed this challenging task and I found the AI field to be fascinating which is why I decided to pursue a PhD in this field, so I can take part in the research that is being conducted.