Reza Kakooee is a PhD researcher at the chair of Digital Building Technologies, at the Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zurich. His dissertation focuses on the application of deep reinforcement learning in housing design, an area where he combines his expertise in machine learning with architectural innovation.

Reza holds a master’s degree in Electrical and Control Engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, where he conducted his research on reinforcement learning and electricity markets. After graduation, he taught as a lecturer at a university in Iran for a few years, followed by doing research on computational neuroscience, more specifically human decision-making and reinforcement learning, to understand how the human brain has inspired artificial intelligence (AI). He is broadly interested in machine learning, but his passion for creative AI brought him to the Department of Architecture at ETH.

He also held a position as a research associate in the Computer Science Department at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he developed machine learning models to address real-world challenges.

His expertise in machine learning spans several domains, including reinforcement learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and large language models.