Sutton honoured for groundbreaking research into machine learning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Richard Sutton, the University of Alberta (U ofA) professor whose research into machine learning helped advance AI, will receive the University of Alberta\u2019s highest honour this March.<\/p>\n
\u201cRichard Sutton\u2019s groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence has had a transformative impact in helping to build one of the world\u2019s great universities for the public good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nizar Somji, U of A<\/p>\n
Sutton, a professor in the university\u2019s Department of Computing Science, is slated to receive an honourary degree from the university at its first winter convocation later this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonourary degrees are intended to recognize individuals of upstanding character whose contributions are extraordinary and inspirational,\u201d said university chancellor Nizar Somji in a press release. \u201cProfessor Richard Sutton\u2019s groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence has had a transformative impact in helping to build one of the world\u2019s great universities for the public good.\u201d<\/p>\n
A faculty member since 2003, Sutton is the founder of modern computational reinforcement learning, a branch of machine learning in which AI systems learn to solve problems through trial-and-error, mirroring human learning. His research has led him to become one of the world\u2019s leading innovators in AI, advancing the field and having wide-ranging applications across medicine, economics, engineering, and agriculture.<\/p>\n
Sutton\u2019s career predates his tenure with the U of A. The Stanford University and University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate published Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction \u2014 an essential text in the field \u2014 all the way back in 1998. Sutton\u2019s scientific publications have been cited at least 175,000 times.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Born in the midwestern United States, Sutton became a Canadian citizen in 2015 and formally renounced his American citizenship in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since then, he\u2019s served as Chair of Reinforcement Learning and AI at iCORE\/AITF until 2018 and founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab<\/a>. He is also chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute<\/a> and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the late 2010s, he co-founded Google DeepMind Alberta, the company\u2019s first international research lab, and later partnered with video game engineer John Carmack at Carmack\u2019s Keen Technologies.<\/p>\n This honourary degree is not the first major milestone Sutton has been honoured with; in 2018, Sutton received a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. He was also a co-recipient<\/a> of the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, the world\u2019s most prestigious prize in computing science.
BetaKit\u2019s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YE<\/a>G<\/a>AF<\/a>, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sutton honoured for groundbreaking research into machine learning.
Richard Sutton, the University of Alberta (U ofA) professor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[62,901,49,48,23752,11423,137015,61,81244],"class_list":["post-441486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton","tag-prairies","tag-richard-sutton","tag-technology","tag-university-of-alberta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}