Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton win the AM Turing Award 2024

Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton of the United States of America have been selected for the prestigious 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The winner of the prestigious A.M.Turner award, which is considered as a Nobel Prize in Computing, was announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York, United States of America.

Both the winners will share the $1 million prize money sponsored by Google.

Work of Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton 

Both Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton were honoured for their work in conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, crucial for artificial intelligence.

They introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning. 

Reinforcement learning is one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems in computers.

About the Prize Winners 

Andrew G. Barto is Professor Emeritus, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts, the United States of America.

Richard S. Sutton is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, the United States of America.

Andrew Barto was the PhD and postdoctoral advisor of Richard Sutton at the University of Massachusetts. 

Richard Sutton did his BA in Psychology from Stanford University and MS and PhD degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

About the A.M. Turing Award

• The A.M.Turing award was instituted in 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, United States of America.
• It is given every year to individuals whose work has outstanding significance for computer science.
• The prize has been founded as a tribute to the British mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst Alan Mathison Turing.
• Alan Mathison Turing is also known as the father of Computer Science.
• No one from India has won the A.M. Turing Award.