Dr. Lisa Torrey

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Lisa Torrey came to St. Lawrence University in 2009 from the University of Wisconsin, where she earned her doctorate in computer science in the area of artificial intelligence. She teaches computer science courses from programming to computational theory, and conducts research in machine learning and in computer science education. Her work has focused on reinforcement learning, which improves the behavior of artificial agents over time through rewards, and on transfer learning, which applies knowledge agents have learned in old tasks to speed up their learning in new tasks.

Current research projects: A machine-learning study on crowd simulation via multi-agent reinforcement learning, and a pedagogical study on how students choose programs to write when given a choice.