About Us

Josiah Hanna is an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. He received his Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin and his B.S. in computer science and mathematics at the University of Kentucky. Before joining UW--Madison, he was a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh and also spent time at FiveAI working on autonomous driving. His research interests lie in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning, seeking to develop algorithms that allow autonomous agents to learn effective behaviors from their experience. In particular, he studies reinforcement learning and methods to increase the applicability of reinforcement learning to real-world use-cases.

Dr. Michelle Sizemore is Associate Professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences and the Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Her research focuses on the irrational features of democracy in late-eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. She is the author of American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (Oxford University Press, 2018) and is currently completing her second book, Irritability, which examines unpleasant political feelings in nineteenth-century American literature. She teaches courses on a range of topics, time periods, and national traditions, most recently a class on censorship called “Reading Dangerously“ and a class on the Dark Academia literary genre.