Robohub.org
 

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton win 2024 Turing Award


by
06 March 2025



share this:

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton. Image credit: Association for Computing Machinery.

The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The pair have received the honour for “developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning”. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning.

The Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, to be split between the recipients. Since its inception in 1966, the award has honoured computer scientists and engineers on a yearly basis. The prize was last given for AI research in 2018, when Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton were recognised for their contribution to the field of deep neural networks.

Andrew Barto is Professor Emeritus, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He began his career at UMass Amherst as a postdoctoral Research Associate in 1977, and has subsequently held various positions including Associate Professor, Professor, and Department Chair. Barto received a BS degree in Mathematics (with distinction) from the University of Michigan, where he also earned his MS and PhD degrees in Computer and Communication Sciences.

Richard Sutton is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies (an artificial general intelligence company based in Dallas, Texas) and Chief Scientific Advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Sutton was a Distinguished Research Scientist at Deep Mind from 2017 to 2023. Prior to joining the University of Alberta, he served as a Principal Technical Staff Member in the Artificial Intelligence Department at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory in Florham Park, New Jersey, from 1998 to 2002. Sutton received his BA in Psychology from Stanford University and earned his MS and PhD degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The two researchers began collaborating in 1978, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where Barto was Sutton’s PhD and postdoctoral advisor.

Find out more




AIhub is a non-profit dedicated to connecting the AI community to the public by providing free, high-quality information in AI.
AIhub is a non-profit dedicated to connecting the AI community to the public by providing free, high-quality information in AI.





Related posts :



Engineering fantasy into reality

  26 Aug 2025
PhD student Erik Ballesteros is building “Doc Ock” arms for future astronauts.

RoboCup@Work League: Interview with Christoph Steup

and   22 Aug 2025
Find out more about the RoboCup League focussed on industrial production systems.

Interview with Haimin Hu: Game-theoretic integration of safety, interaction and learning for human-centered autonomy

and   21 Aug 2025
Hear from Haimin in the latest in our series featuring the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants.

AIhub coffee corner: Agentic AI

  15 Aug 2025
The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation.

Interview with Kate Candon: Leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions

and   25 Jul 2025
Hear from PhD student Kate about her work on human-robot interactions.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up part 2

  24 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the second half of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up 1

  21 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the opening days of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.

Livestream of RoboCup2025

  18 Jul 2025
Watch the competition live from Salvador!



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence