PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ashley Edwards

Ashley Edwards is an AI researcher who studies how agents can learn from video and helps turn videos into interactive worlds. She earned a computer science degree at the University of Georgia and a PhD at Georgia Tech, then worked at Uber AI Labs and Google DeepMind. She coauthored Gato and worked on Genie, which won an ICML 2024 Best Paper award. She worked on video generation at Runway in 2025 and returned to Google DeepMind by February 2026. As of October 2026, she is a senior research scientist focused on reinforcement learning and foundational world models.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2011–2019

    A Georgia Tech PhD

    She earns a BS in computer science at the University of Georgia in 2011 and completes a PhD at Georgia Tech in 2019. Her doctoral work develops models that infer latent actions, rewards, and policies from videos.

  2. 2018–2019

    Learning policies from video

    In 2018, she interns at Google Brain. In 2019, she coauthors the ICML paper Imitating Latent Policies from Observation, which infers latent policies directly from state observations.

  3. March 2019

    Research at Uber AI Labs

    She joins Uber AI Labs as a research scientist in March 2019.

  4. 2020

    Value from state transitions

    Her ICML 2020 paper, Estimating Q(s,s’) with Deep Deterministic Dynamics Gradients, defines value over neighboring state transitions and learns a forward dynamics model to maximize it.

  5. 2022

    A generalist agent

    She coauthors A Generalist Agent in 2022, introducing Gato, a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment policy that can play Atari, caption images, chat, and control a robot arm with the same network.

  6. 2024

    Genie wins an ICML award

    By 2024, she is a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and works on Genie, an unsupervised generative model trained on unlabelled Internet videos to create action-controllable worlds. Genie wins an ICML Best Paper award in 2024.

  7. March 2025

    Video generation at Runway

    In March 2025, she is a member of technical staff at Runway and works on video generation. Her research explores models that infer latent actions, rewards, and policies from videos alone.

  8. As of October 2026

    Back at Google DeepMind

    By February 2026, she is back at Google DeepMind as a senior research scientist focused on reinforcement learning and foundational world models.

Career

  1. Since 2026Google DeepMindSenior Research Scientist
  2. From 2025RunwayMember of Technical Staff
  3. From 2019UberResearch Scientist
  4. From 2018Google BrainIntern

Education

  1. 2019Georgia Institute of TechnologyPhD
  2. 2011University of GeorgiaBS in computer science

From the biography.

Videos

YouTube videos in which Ashley Edwards speaks or appears, newest first. A model chose them from YouTube search results. List updated 21 October 2026.

  1. AIs can now imagine video games in real-timeMachine Learning Street Talk · 13 September 2024 · 25 min
  2. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments with Ashley Edwards - 696The TWIML AI Podcast with Sam Charrington · 5 August 2024 · 46 min

Video data from YouTube API Services. By watching you agree to the YouTube Terms of Service. How we use YouTube data.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Ashley Edwards. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ashley Edwards yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Ashley Edwards ashedwards.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. News — Ashley Edwards ashedwards.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Imitating Latent Policies from Observation | ML Anthology mlanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Estimating Q(s,s’) with Deep Deterministic Dynamics Gradients proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. A Generalist Agent arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Announcing Ashley Edwards at RAAIS 2024 press.airstreet.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. ICARL - Seminar Series sites.google.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Ashley Edwards – RPL Summer School 2026 summer-school.rpl.eecs.kth.se. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Speaker Series Winter 2025/26: eight talks to rewatch bliss.berlin. Checked 20 October 2026.