Josiah Hanna Assistant Professor, UW--Madison

Josiah Hanna

jphanna [at] cs.wisc.edu
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin -- Madison

I am an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison. The goal of my research is to develop fully autonomous agents that learn how to achieve goals from experience. Towards this goal, I study a branch of machine learning called reinforcement learning (RL) that enables autonomous agents to learn via trial and error interaction. The goal of my research is to develop and apply reinforcement learning algorithms that are effective with a limited amount of task interaction time and to integrate these algorithms into complete autonomous agents.

I am part of the broader reinforcement learning and robotics groups at UW -- Madison and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute.

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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. Prior to attending UT Austin, he completed 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 (now part of Bosch) working on autonomous driving.

The goal of his research is to develop fully autonomous agents that learn how to achieve goals from experience. In particular, he studies reinforcement learning (RL) and methods to increase the data efficiency of RL algorithms and our confidence in the behaviors output by RL algorithms.

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  • Teaching
    • Spring 2026: CS 639: Autonomous Robotics
    • Fall 2025: CS 839: Topics in RL
    • Spring 2025: CS 639: Autonomous Robotics
    • Fall 2023: CS 760: Machine Learning
    • Spring 2023: CS 540: Intro to AI
    • Fall 2022: CS 839: Topics in RL
    • Fall 2021: CS 540: Intro to AI
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