PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jakob Foerster

Also known as Jakob N. Foerster

Jakob Foerster is an Oxford machine learning researcher whose PhD work helped bring deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to the forefront of AI research. After physics degrees at Christ's College, Cambridge, he completed his Oxford PhD under Shimon Whiteson in 2018, and his papers won an AAAI Outstanding Student Paper Award and an ICML Best Paper Runner Up Award in 2018. As a research scientist at Facebook AI Research in California, he developed the zero-shot coordination problem setting, a step towards safe human-AI coordination. He joined Oxford's Department of Engineering Science in October 2021, led the FLAIR lab there, and returned part time to FAIR at Meta AI in September 2024. Today he is the founding director of BOLD, a UK AI research lab hosted by Oxford with teams from University College London and Imperial College London.

Timeline

  1. 2016–2017

    Learning to communicate

    He completes undergraduate and master's degrees in physics at Christ's College, Cambridge. As an Oxford PhD student, he coauthors "Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" in 2016 with Yannis Assael, Nando de Freitas and Shimon Whiteson, proposing the RIAL and DIAL methods. In 2017, he is the lead organizer of the first Emergent Communication workshop at NeurIPS.

  2. 2018

    A PhD under Shimon Whiteson

    He earns his Oxford PhD in 2018 with a dissertation on deep multi-agent reinforcement learning, supervised by Shimon Whiteson. During the PhD, he interns at Google Brain, OpenAI and DeepMind and helps bring deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to the forefront of AI research.

  3. 2018

    Two paper awards

    His paper "Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients" wins an Outstanding Student Paper Award at AAAI 2018. At ICML 2018, "The Mechanics of n-Player Differentiable Games", written with David Balduzzi, Sebastien Racaniere, James Martens, Karl Tuyls and Thore Graepel, receives a Best Paper Runner Up Award.

  4. December 2019

    A CIFAR AI Chair

    In December 2019, he is named a CIFAR AI Chair alongside seven other University of Toronto researchers who are also Vector Institute faculty, with a planned post as assistant professor at U of T Scarborough in 2020.

  5. 2020

    Zero-shot coordination at FAIR

    After his PhD, he works as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research in California, where he develops the zero-shot coordination problem setting, a step towards safe human-AI coordination. In 2020, he coauthors "Other-Play" for Zero-Shot Coordination with Hengyuan Hu, Adam Lerer and Alex Peysakhovich; in the card game Hanabi, its other-play agents score higher with independently trained partners.

  6. October 2021

    Associate professor at Oxford

    In October 2021, he joins Oxford's Department of Engineering Science as an associate professor and becomes a tutorial fellow at St Anne's College. There he leads the Foerster Lab for AI Research (FLAIR), a group focused on reinforcement learning with an emphasis on meta-learning, multi-agent and open-ended settings.

  7. 2023–2024

    An ERC grant and FAIR again

    He receives an ERC Starter Grant in 2023. In September 2024, he returns to FAIR and Meta AI in a part-time position to help build a new team on multi-agent approaches to universal intelligence.

  8. Since June 2026

    Founding director of BOLD

    In June 2026, Oxford is selected to host the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD), a new UK AI research lab led by Foerster and funded through a £60 million EPSRC investment in two AI labs. More than 350 researchers, innovators and policymakers gather in Oxford in September 2026 for the launch of BOLD, which brings together teams from Oxford, University College London and Imperial College London. He is its founding director, an associate professor at Oxford and a research scientist at FAIR, Meta AI.

  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.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. New Faculty members in Civil and Information Engineering and Entrepreneurship eng.ox.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. NeurIPS 2022: Jakob Foerster, Invited Talk in Workshop: Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop neurips.cc. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Jakob Foerster - The Mathematics Genealogy Project genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Learning for Collaboration, Not Competition - Robohub robohub.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Jakob N. Foerster jakobfoerster.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2018 Awards icml.cc. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Artificial intelligence researchers named CIFAR AI Chairs utoronto.ca. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Jakob Foerster - Oxford Martin AIGI aigi.ox.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. "Other-Play" for Zero-Shot Coordination arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  11. FLAIR foersterlab.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  12. SWC Hybrid Seminar: Reinforcement Learning at the Hyperscale sainsburywellcome.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  13. Oxford to host new UK AI Research Lab eng.ox.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  14. British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab Festival launches eng.ox.ac.uk. Checked 19 October 2026.