PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Dylan Foster

Dylan Foster is a machine learning researcher whose work connects reinforcement learning, interactive decision making, and foundation-model training. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering at USC in 2014, completed a computer science PhD at Cornell in 2019, and won COLT paper awards in 2018 and 2019. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and coauthored a 2023 monograph with Alexander Rakhlin on the statistical foundations of reinforcement learning and interactive decision making. As of October 2026, he is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and is set to join UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in EECS and Statistics in January 2027.

Links
Website, Google Scholar and X

Timeline

  1. 2014

    Electrical engineering at USC

    He earns BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2014.

  2. 2018

    A COLT student paper award

    He and Karthik Sridharan win COLT's Best Student Paper Award in 2018.

  3. 2019

    A Cornell PhD and awards

    He completes a PhD in computer science at Cornell in 2019, advised by Karthik Sridharan. His paper Orthogonal Statistical Learning earns COLT's Best Paper Award in 2019. Cornell Computer Science gives him its Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2019.

  4. 2021

    Postdoctoral work at MIT

    In 2021, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Institute for Foundations of Data Science.

  5. 2023

    A reinforcement learning monograph

    With Alexander Rakhlin, he publishes Foundations of Reinforcement Learning and Interactive Decision Making as a 2023 preprint. The monograph gives a statistical view of interactive decision making across bandits and reinforcement learning with function approximation.

  6. 2026

    Coverage profiles for post-training

    At a January 2026 seminar, he introduces the coverage profile—the probability mass a model places on high-quality outputs—as a statistical quantity for foundation-model post-training success.

  7. As of October 2026

    Principal researcher at Microsoft

    In October 2026, he is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, New England and New York City. He is set to join UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in EECS and Statistics in January 2027.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Dylan Foster dylanfoster.net. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Machine Learning at Cornell research.cs.cornell.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Machine Learning and Friends Lunch: Dylan Foster, Understanding the foundation model pipeline: From imitation to exploration cics.umass.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Publications - Dylan Foster dylanfoster.net. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. SCS Seminar Talk: Dylan Foster | College of Computing cc.gatech.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Foundations of Reinforcement Learning and Interactive Decision Making arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Statistics and Data Science Seminar - Dylan Foster | Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department csd.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Dylan Foster at Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 19 October 2026.