Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Receive 2026 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award
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Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Professor Emeritus Andrew Barto and University of Alberta Professor Richard Sutton ’80MS ’84PhD have been named recipients of the 2026 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award for their “contributions to reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence.”
The IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, one of the organization’s highest honors in computational intelligence, recognizes outstanding contributions to biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms and systems.
Barto and Sutton are internationally recognized for pioneering the field of reinforcement learning, a branch of machine learning that underpins many of today’s most impactful AI applications, shaping both the theoretical foundations and practical advances in the field.
This recognition follows their receipt of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” awarded for their fundamental contributions to reinforcement learning and its influence on the broader field of artificial intelligence.