creators

Richard Sutton: Turing Award, Oak Lab, Alberta

Richard Sutton shared the 2024 Turing Award for reinforcement learning. He founded Oak Lab in 2026 and teaches computing science at the University of Alberta.

Richard S. Sutton, born in 1957 or 1958 in Toledo, Ohio, is one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning. He took a BA in psychology from Stanford in 1978, then an MS (1980) and a PhD (1984) in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under Andrew Barto. He developed temporal-difference learning and contributed foundational work on policy-gradient methods and the Dyna architecture. He has taught computing science at the University of Alberta since 2003, where he helped establish the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; he is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. From 2017 to 2023 he was a distinguished research scientist at Google DeepMind and helped open its Edmonton office. With Barto he wrote 'Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction' (1998; second edition 2018), and on 13 March 2019 posted the essay 'The Bitter Lesson'. He became a Canadian citizen in 2015 and renounced his US citizenship; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. In 2024 Sutton and Barto jointly received the ACM A.M. Turing Award for the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, and on 18 March 2026 Alberta conferred an honorary degree on him at its first winter convocation. He was a research scientist at Keen Technologies, John Carmack's company, until July 2026; in June 2026 he founded the startup Oak Lab with Khurram Javed. He is also founder and pro-bono chief scientist of the Openmind Research Institute, and now teaches at Alberta quarter-time.

Specialization

reinforcement learning, temporal-difference learning, continual learning, artificial general intelligence

Country

Canada