about.html

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title: About
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            The Farama Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the field of reinforcement
            learning through promoting better <a href="/project_standards">standardization</a> and open source <a
                href="/projects">tooling</a> for both researchers and industry.
            <br>
            <br>
            Currently we do this through maintaining three widely used core libraries that offer standard APIs between
            reinforcement learning different kinds of “environments” (e.g. robotics simulations, video games, etc.), as
            well as many of the most widely used reinforcement learning environments for researchers. You can view the
            full list of our libraries <a href="https://farama.org/projects">here</a>; they have 10s of millions of
            installations and are depended on by 10s of
            thousands of projects and represent many of the most installed reinforcement learning (or just machine
            learning in general) libraries in the world.
            <br>
            <br>
            Our short term goals are to make various long planned large quality of life, productivity performance
            improvements to our core libraries and to promote their adoption throughout the open source reinforcement
            learning ecosystem, to provide maintenance and bug fixes to the environments we have that are mature, and to
            bring in more key open source reinforcement learning projects and bring them up to our standards for
            maturity. When we conducted an informal poll of 50 professional RL researchers in 2022, the average
            researcher reported that our planned quality of life and productivity improvements to these libraries will
            save them an average of 1 week per paper. Many of the environment upgrades that we're working on will
            hopefully result more an an a 10x speedup (though some will be 1000x or more).
            <br>
            <br>
            Our long term goals involve expanding into offering better standardization tools for engineers and academics
            working on applied reinforcement learning tasks (though things like providing a Gymnasium-like standard C
            API), as well as to provide key open source tools for reinforcement learning beyond just the environment
            layer of the stack.
            <br>
            <br>
            The team supporting this effort includes roughly 25 <a href="https://farama.org/team">core members</a>, and
            roughly 80 non-core contributors,
            spanning approximately 12 time zones and every background imaginable. Many of our core contributors came
            from the team behind <a href="https://github.com/openai/gym">OpenAI Gym</a>, which we were the maintainers
            of for 2 years before it was replaced by our
            <a href="https://gymnasium.farama.org/main/">Gymnasium library</a>.
            <br>
            <br>
            If you'd like to read in more detail about our origins and motivations, please check out our <a
                href="https://farama.org/Announcing-The-Farama-Foundation">announcement</a>
            blog post. If you'd like to get in touch with us about funding or anything else, you can reach out at
            <a href="mailto:contact@farama.org">contact@farama.org</a>, but our community is primarily organized through
            a large <a href="https://discord.gg/PfR7a79FpQ">discord server</a>. If you'd like
            to donate, you can do so <a href="https://farama.org/donations">here</a>; the funds go to paying our engineers to work full time on these libraries.
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