Peter Dayan FRS is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, along with Ivan De Araujo.

[3] He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning (RL) where he helped develop the Q-learning algorithm, and made contributions to unsupervised learning, including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the Helmholtz machine.

[4][5][6] Dayan studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and then continued for a PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics on statistical learning[7] supervised by David Willshaw and David Wallace, focusing on associative memory and reinforcement learning.

[7] After his PhD, Dayan held postdoctoral research positions with Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.

[10] “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11) This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.