The wildly popular video game, Minecraft, might appear to be an unlikely candidate for machine learning research, but to Dr. Katja Hofmann, the research lead of Project Malmo in the Machine Intelligence and Perception Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, it’s the perfect environment for teaching AI agents, via reinforcement learning, to act intelligently – and cooperatively – in the open world.

Today, Dr. Hofmann talks about her vision of a future where machines learn to collaborate with people and empower them to help solve complex, real-world problems. She also shares the story of how her early years in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, shaped her both personally and professionally, and ultimately facilitated a creative, exploratory mindset about computing that informs her work to this day.