By: Krista Davidson
10 Mar, 2025
Rich Sutton honoured with Turing Award for major contributions to AI
March 10, 2025
Award recognizes foundational contributions in advancing reinforcement learning
Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto have been recognized with the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning (RL). The award is one of the most prestigious in the field and is considered the “Nobel Prize for Computing”. It is a prize valued at $1 million USD. With this award, the chief science advisors of all three of Canada’s National AI Institutes, Amii, Mila and the Vector Institute, are Turing Award winners, an incredible testament to the strength of Canada’s leadership in AI research and talent.
Sutton is the chief scientific advisor of Amii, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and an Associate Fellow of CIFAR’s Learning in Machines and Brains program. He is also a professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta. Barto is a Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Together with collaborators, the pair developed basic algorithmic approaches for RL, with temporal difference learning as one of their most prominent contributions.
According to the ACM: “In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning – one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems”.
These foundational advances in RL — a field of machine learning in which intelligent agents learn based on interactions with an environment, much the same way that humans and animals do — have proved critical to advancing applications such as autonomous driving and the development of the chatbots like ChatGPT, that use reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to train and improve responses based on interactions with humans.
“On behalf of the CIFAR community, I offer my congratulations to Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto for this remarkable recognition,” says Stephen Toope, President and CEO of CIFAR. “It is an important recognition of the significance of their work to develop the reinforcement learning approach and its tremendous potential for societal impact today and in the future.”
“This award demonstrates the importance of early and sustained investments in AI research and talent,” says Elissa Strome, Executive Director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy at CIFAR. “Canada’s leadership in AI research and talent was built over decades of investment, and has been supercharged since 2017 with the establishment of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. Rich Sutton is one of the luminaries of the Canadian AI ecosystem and his leadership has been essential to its growth and success. His research helped establish foundational concepts and algorithms in RL. AI would not be where it is today without these vital ideas and contributions.”
Long association with CIFAR
Sutton joined the CIFAR community in 2015 as an Associate Fellow of the Learning in Machines & Brains program, one of the earliest research programs in Canada dedicated to investigating how brains and artificial systems become intelligent through learning.
He has been a Canada CIFAR AI Chair since 2021, a flagship program of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, designed to attract and retain the world’s leading AI researchers to Canada.
Sutton is a big thinker who uses computer science to better understand ourselves and the world around us. In 2020, Sutton told CIFAR: “Artificial intelligence, even though it has the word artificial in it, [aims] to answer the fundamental question of what I am, and how I work, and what is my role in the universe.”
In his career, he has mentored hundreds of trainees, including through his unwavering support for the CIFAR Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) Summer School, Canada’s premier AI training program, which attracts some of the brightest minds around the globe. CIFAR is excited to share that Sutton will be returning to the DLRL Summer School for the 2025 edition, to be hosted in Edmonton in partnership with Amii.
CIFAR researchers recognized globally for their contributions
Sutton is not the only CIFAR-affiliated researcher to receive the Turing Award. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun were recognized with the A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to the development of deep learning in 2019.
In October 2024, Geoffrey Hinton, an Advisor of CIFAR’s Learning in Machines & Brains, University of Toronto Professor Emeritus and chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute was awarded the Nobel Prize with Princeton University’s John J. Hopfield for discoveries that enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks.
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