Barto, Sutton '84PhD Receive 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award
About
The global computing community is celebrating Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Professor Emeritus Andrew G. Barto and alumnus Richard S. Sutton ’80MS ’84PhD, who were named 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates for pioneering the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, the branch of artificial intelligence that enables systems to learn through trial and feedback.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” carries a $1 million prize with financial support provided by Google, Inc. The award is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.
Feature Stories
Since the field’s earliest days, UMass Amherst has been on the leading edge of reinforcement learning, a branch of AI which is now poised to disrupt numerous sectors of society.
Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton took on the topic of Reinforcement Learning in the late 1970s. Eventually, their research led to the creation of reinforcement learning algorithms that sought not to recognize patterns but maximize rewards.
A profile of 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto, charting their journey from “unfashionable” lab work at UMass Amherst in the late-1970s to pioneering the reinforcement-learning techniques that now power AlphaGo and today’s large language-model fine-tuning.
A Celebration of Professor Emeritus Andrew Barto
