About

I am a PhD candidate in computing science at the University of Alberta, part of RLAI and Amii, and supervised by Dale Schuurmans and Marlos C. Machado. I am broadly interested in the foundations of learning from experience, with my dissertation exploring an optimization perspective on plasticity and a computational perspective on adaptation.

My research seeks to understand the problems faced by an agent that efficiently uses its resources and experience to continually adapt its behaviour. A central problem that I have studied is loss of plasticity in neural networks, a phenomenon in which performance degrades over the course of continual gradient-based optimization. More recently, I have been interested in a big world problem setting, where (1) it is suboptimal to stop learning, and (2) this need for continual learning cannot be outscaled. With this perspective, I am developing learning algorithms that are effective for agents with different computational resources and capabilities, from small and simple agents to larger and more complex ones.

Before my PhD, I completed an MSc in statistics at the University of Alberta (supervised by Ivor Cribben and Rohana Karunamuni), and a BMath at the University of Waterloo.

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© Alex Lewandowski. Last modified: February 17, 2026. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.