About

I’m Samuel (Sam) Sarjant. This is my professional(ish) website with a bunch of crap on it. Game stuff, official stuff, just whatever needs to be here.

I am currently employed at AgroCares as Senior Data Scientist. Primarily, my time is spent building better prediction models, cleaning up data and spectrometer problems, and addressing various data issues. Previously I worked as a Research Fellow at The University of Waikato, working on a Marsden-funded automated ontology-building project. The aim is to develop a number of heuristics for feeding in information and using the wealth of information to disambiguate, test, and present to users millions of assertions and concepts representing things in the world around us.

During the Research Fellow position, I also lectured part time. I teach 50% of the level 3 Artificial Intelligence course, and 50% of the level 3 Graphics and Computer Games courses. And prior to that, during my undergrad and PhD, I trained in, and taught martial arts for a couple of years.

Speaking of the PhD, my PhD research was entitled ‘Policy Search Based Relational Reinforcement Learning using the Cross-Entropy Method‘. This research is focused on the development of a policy-search algorithm dubbed CERRLA (Cross-Entropy Relational Reinforcement Learning Agent).

More casually, I’m an avid board gamer, obsessed tabletop RPG GM and player, regular video-gamer, and wannabe improviser. To my name, I’ve founded both the Waikato Boardgaming Club and Wageningen Boardgaming Group (well, I significantly expanded the latter one). I’ve also performed at a number of improv shows in Wageningen, and designed a couple of minor videogames during the Global Game Jam.

As for programming, check out my GitHub where most of my code for major projects go.

A list of my publications can be found here.