cv
Basics
| Name | Sam Earle |
| Label | PhD Candidate |
| sam.earle@nyu.edu | |
| Url | https://smearle.github.io/ |
| Summary | Studying open-ended learning through procedural content generation in video games. |
Work
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2025.08 - 2025.12 PhD Research Intern
Sakana AI (Tokyo, Japan)
Exploring open-ended VLM-driven content generation loops under the supervision of Sebastian Risi.
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2024.10 - 2025.05 Research Consultant (part-time, remote)
Microsoft Research
Continued work with Andrzej Banburski-Fahey to develop DreamGarden (see below), and explore multi-modal input for automatic game and environment generation.
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2024.06 - 2024.09 PhD Research Intern
Microsoft Research
Working under the supervision of Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, as part of the Deep Learning and Speaking the World into Existence teams, to develop DreamGarden, a design assistant for generating simulations in Unreal Engine 5, with a hierarchical planning module and dynamic orchestration between submodules for generating C++ code, 3D assets, and procedural meshes.
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2022.09 - 2023.03 PhD Research Intern
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) (London, UK)
Working under the supervision of Roberta Raileanu, as part of the Reinforcement Learning team, to explore the use of pretrained multi-modal generative models for environment generation. Developed DreamCraft, a text-guided NeRF approach for generating structures/environments in MineCraft, with a novel quantization and neural rendering scheme allowing for optimization over both in-game appearance of artifacts as well as their functional properties (i.e. adjacency constraints and block type frequencies).
Volunteer
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2008 - 2012 Ecuador, India, Haiti, Ghana
Volunteer, Ambassador, and Speaker
Free the Children
Free the Children (now "We" charity) is a Canadian non-profit that aims to empower youth by increasing access to education in developing countries. I helped create a club at my middle school dedicated to fundraising and awareness for the charity. During my time on Degrassi, we partnered with the organization and travelled to various countries to learn about and assist with their projects (e.g. building schools, gardens, playgrounds, systems for providing clean water). We acted as public ambassadors for the charity (the trips were filmed and turned into short documentaries that aired on MTV), and I spoke at the charity's "We Day" events in Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and Hamilton.
Education
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2020.09 - 2026.06 Brooklyn, NY, USA
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2011.09 - 2017.06 Toronto, ON, Canada
Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction
University of Toronto
Cognitive Science, Computational Cognition stream (Major), Computer Science (Minor), Cinema Studies (Minor)
Skills
| Programming languages & libraries | |
| JAX | |
| PyTorch | |
| Python | |
| C++ | |
| Javascript | |
| Java |
Languages
| English | |
| Native speaker |
| French | |
| Fluent |