Diederik M. Roijers completed his master's in Computing Science at Utrecht University before obtaining his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence under the supervision of Shimon Whiteson and Frans A. Oliehoek at the University of Amsterdam in 2016. He then joined the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral research assistant. He was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant from the FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders) and started as an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in October 2016. His research focuses on creating intelligent autonomous systems that assist humans in solving complex problems, especially those with multiple objectives.

To this end, he focuses on decision-theoretic planning and learning, which enable agents to use mathematical models to reason about the environments in which they operate. In the multi-objective problems he has been studying, the agents produce a set of possibly optimal policies that offer different trade-offs with respect to the objectives, to help users make an informed decision. Shimon Whiteson studied English and Computer Science at Rice University before completing his doctorate in Computer Science under the supervision of Peter Stone at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He then spent eight years as an Assistant and then an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam before joining the University of Oxford as an Associate Professor in 2015. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2014. His research focuses on artificial intelligence with the goal of designing, analyzing, and evaluating the algorithms that enable computational systems to acquire and execute intelligent behavior. He is particularly interested in machine learning, with which computers can learn from experience, and decision-theoretic planning, with which they can reason about their goals and deduce behavioral strategies that maximize their utility. In addition to theoretical work on these topics, he has in recent years also focused on applying them to practical problems in robotics and search engine optimization.