Simon Whiteson, Professor of Computer Science oxford university One of the most cited researchers in multi-agent reinforcement learning, has announced that he is leaving Waymo to lead a new multi-agent learning team. Google Deep Mind.
Whiteson shared the news in a LinkedIn post, writing that after six years working in Alphabet’s self-driving division, he is “ready to take on new challenges and extremely excited about the opportunity to build something great with DeepMind.”
He joined Waymo in late 2019 as a staff researcher and was promoted to senior staff researcher in January 2024. Previously, he was Principal Researcher at Latent Logic, an Oxford University spin-out focused on imitative learning for self-driving cars. Latent Logic was acquired by Waymo in 2019. He has also held a professorship at the University of Oxford since 2015.
Research record spans basic multi-agent work
Whiteson’s academic work ranks him among the most influential researchers working at the intersection of reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems. His co-authored papers include work on QMIX, a foundational method for multi-agent value function factorization, which has been cited more than 4,300 times, as well as work on multi-agent policy gradients, communication in deep multi-agent systems, and the StarCraft multi-agent challenge benchmark, each of which has been cited more than 1,700 times.
His research group in Oxford, Whiteson Research Lab, has published papers in NeurIPS, AAAI, ICML, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. His work on LipNet, an end-to-end sentence-level lip reading system, has been cited more than 640 times.
“I started out as a self-driving skeptic, but working at Waymo and witnessing its dramatic growth turned me into a true self-driving believer,” Whiteson wrote. “I’m as bullish on Waymo as ever.”
Whiteson described this as an “incredible time to be working at the forefront of AI capabilities.”
