We’re excited to announce that Tatjana Chavdarova has received funding for a WWTF Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators Grant!

Tatjana’s project, Multi-Player Artificial Intelligence, is endowed with close to €1.8 million and runs until 2033. The Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators (VRG) are designed to attract outstanding early-career researchers from abroad, providing the opportunity to establish independent research groups. The project explores how AI can mirror the way humans learn and make decisions in social, competitive, and cooperative settings.

Human intelligence thrives in social settings where cooperation and competition intersect—allowing us to make complex decisions. MultiPlayerAI draws on this principle, aiming to develop AI systems that can learn, adapt, and strategize in real-world, multi-agent scenarios beyond simple proof-of-concept setups. The project focuses on three core goals: improving optimization for multiplayer games, building foundational frameworks for dynamic multi-agent AI, and advancing multi-agent reinforcement learning with socially conscious agents. By developing algorithms that track evolving strategies, ensure reliable learning, and efficiently use computational resources, MultiPlayerAI bridges the gap between theoretical breakthroughs and practical applications. By addressing fundamental challenges in multi-player AI, it aims at amplifying AI’s positive impact on society and paving the way for more adaptive, resilient, and socially beneficial AI systems.

Congratulations to Tatjana on this outstanding achievement!

About Tatjana Chavdarova

Tatjana Chavdarova is an Assistant Professor at the Research Unit Machine Learning, headed by Thomas Gärtner, at TU Wien Informatics. Her research focuses on the theoretical foundations of learning dynamics in multi-agent and game-theoretic machine learning. She received her PhD from EPFL and Idiap under the supervision of François Fleuret, with research stays at Mila (with Yoshua Bengio and Simon Lacoste-Julien) and DeepMind (with Irina Jurenka). She was a Postdoctoral Researcher at EPFL’s MLO Lab with Martin Jaggi and at UC Berkeley with Michael I. Jordan, and later a Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano, collaborating with Nicola Gatti and Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi. Her work has been supported by two Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) grants and, most recently, by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). She was an organizer of the NeurIPS 2025 workshop Dynamics at the Frontiers of Optimization, Sampling, and Games (DynaFront) and currently serves as President of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), the largest and oldest global non-profit organization for women in AI. Tatjana has served on the WiML board for over five years, including three years as Vice President.

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