DeepMind's AlphaStar & interaction with the team @ NeurIPS, Vancouver

As I reflect back at last year's NeurIPS, I really enjoyed getting a chance to present at one of the evening after party sessions about the work we had done on Deep Reinforcement Learning in Drug Discovery field, but at the same time met a whole lot of folks actively working on Deep Reinforcement Learning. One of them was the team that I had a chance to interact/chat in the morning before general sessions started. It was the team and Oriol Vinyals @ DeepMind from Google, who was gracious enough to spend some time to talk about AlphaStar. This year, with COVID, it's going to be virtual-only conference so really miss the in-person talks with folks like Vinyals will be greatly missed. One of the poster sessions showcased was very insightful. I hope that in future, probably next year, we will get to be at NeurIPS 2021 in person!