In March 2025, Dr. Andrew Barto from the United States of America(USA) and Richard S.Sutton from Canada, two pioneers of Reinforcement Learning (RL), named as recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award, which is often considered as the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’ by New York, the USA-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
- The two have been bestowed with this award in recognition of their exceptional work on RL, a machine learning technique which enables Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to optimize decision-making through trial and error.
- The recipients of the award will share the prize money USD 1 million, which is sponsored by Google Inc.
- Both Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, co-authored the book titled ‘Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction’ in 1998.
About Dr. Andrew Barto:
i.He is Professor Emeritus, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, the USA.
ii.In 1977, Dr. Barto joined the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the UMass as postdoctoral research associate, and later, he held various key positions including, associate professor, professor and department chair.
iii.At present, he is working as an associate member of the Neuroscience and Behavior Program at UMass Amherst.
iv.Awards/ Accolades: He was honoured with 2004 IEEE Neural Network Society Pioneer Award;
- He received International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI-17) Award for his research excellence in both the theory and application of RL.
- In 2019, he was conferred with the UMass Neurosciences Lifetime Achievement Award.
About Richard Sutton:
i.He is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
ii.He is also working as a Research Scientist at Dallas, Texas (the USA)-based Keen Technologies Private Limited and Chief Scientific Advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii).
iii.He was a distinguished Research Scientist at DeepMind Technologies Limited, a British-American AI Research Laboratory which acts as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., from 2017 to 2023.
iv.He received various awards/accolades like: the IJCAI Research Excellence Award from Canada-based AI Association (2021); an Outstanding Achievement in Research Award from the UMass at Amherst.
- He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London; a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI; and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
About ACM A.M. Turing Award:
i.The award was named after Alan M. Turing, a British mathematician who is considered the father of modern computer science.
ii.The award recognizes significant contributions to the computing field since its establishment in 1966.
iii.It honours computer scientists and engineers for creating systems and theoretical foundations important for the advancement of Information Technology (IT).
iv.Israeli mathematician and computer scientist Avi Wigderson won the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award.
