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Dane Malenfant


Tānishi, wīpēsākāstēw. I am a second year MSc. research student in Computer Science at McGill University and Mila - The Québec AI Institute, and very fortunately supervised by Dr. Blake Richards in the Learning in Neural Circuits (LiNC) lab.

My current research has been generously funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Indigenous Studies Program at McGill University, and supported computationally by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC) and the Innovation, Development and Technologies (IDT) team at Mila.


Previously, I completed a bachelors in computer science with psychology at McGill University in 2022 and, before that, a certificate in French as a Second Language at the University of Regina in 2018. I also passed the B2 DELF shortly after.

Research Interests

  • Cooperative behaviour in multi-agent environments and what constitutes the defintion of an agent in an environment.
  • The Credit Assignment Problem in structural, temporal and long-term flavours.
  • Neuro-Inspired algorithms to improve the sample efficiency of good agent behaviour.

During my undergraduate, I was associated with Encode Canada where I contributed to AI literacy and ethics initiatives with blogs posts in the Montréal AI Ethics Institute and hackathon judging. Additionally, I was a co-lead of the machine learning division of McGill Neurotech where we created a brain-computer interface speller that learned EEG signals of flashing letter frequency to type by focusing on letters with vision.

Currently, I am an advisory board member of Indigneous Pathdfinders in AI and evidently I am a citizen of Métis Nation—Saskatchewan.

Selected News and Updates

  • December 2024 I presented results of my ongoing taditional reciprocity at the Indigenous in AI/ML event at NeurIPS 2024.

  • November 2024 I very happily attended the Abundant Intelligences (who also funded my me there!) retreat in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

  • October 2024 I won best masters student poster prize at MAIN 2024.

  • July 2024 I attended the Human Aligned AI summer school in Prague, Czechia! Then I went to Berlin to vists friends and for the museuums, art and culture.