
Richard S. Sutton
Fellow, Canada CIFAR AI Chair & Chief Scientific Advisor
Academic Affiliations
Industry and Research Affiliations
Areas of Expertise
Fellow, Canada CIFAR AI Chair & Chief Scientific Advisor
Academic Affiliations
Industry and Research Affiliations
Areas of Expertise
Richard S. Sutton is one of the pioneers of the field of reinforcement learning.
Richard S. Sutton is one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, an approach to artificial and natural intelligence that emphasizes learning and planning from sample experience, and a field in which he continues to lead the world. He is most interested in understanding what it means to be intelligent, to predict and influence the world, to learn, perceive, act, and think. He seeks to identify general computational principles underlying what we mean by intelligence and goal-directed behaviour. Over his career, he has made a number of significant contributions to the field, including the theory of temporal-difference learning, the actor-critic (policy gradient) class of algorithms, the Dyna architecture (integrating learning, planning and reacting), the Horde architecture, and gradient and emphatic temporal-difference algorithms – among other advancements. Richard currently seeks to extend reinforcement learning ideas to an empirically grounded approach to knowledge representation based on prediction.
Richard is Chief Scientific Advisor, a Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii as well as a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and a Distinguished Research Scientist at DeepMind. He was the original founder of the Reinforcement Learning & Artificial Intelligence (RLAI) Lab at the University of Alberta, and he is co-author of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, the standard textbook on reinforcement learning, now in its second edition. Richard has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC), where he also received a Life Time Achievement Award in 2018. Richard has been academic supervisor to almost 60 early-career researchers, and his publications have been cited more than 93,000 times. Richard has been featured in popular publications such as Science, the Economist, the New York Times, the Wallstreet Journal, and Bloomberg’s Hello World.
Richard has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Jan 31st 2023
Research Post
Nov 23rd 2022
News
Amii researchers present their work in the fields of reinforcement learning, natural language processing, data optimization and more at the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Oct 11th 2022
News
Understanding intelligence could be one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time, according to Amii Chief Scientific Advisor Rich Sutton. And he lays out the Alberta Plan as a roadmap to getting there.
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