AI Pioneer Honored at U of Winter Convocation

A University of Alberta professor who has distinguished himself as one of the world's leading innovators in artificial intelligence will receive an honorary degree during the U of A's first winter convocation this March.

"Honorary degrees are intended to recognize individuals of upstanding character whose contributions are extraordinary and inspirational," says U of A chancellor Nizar Somji. "Professor Richard Sutton's groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence has had a transformative impact in helping to build one of the world's great universities for the public good."

Sutton, a professor in the Department of Computing Science and a founder of modern computational reinforcement learning, has been instrumental in shaping Alberta into a world-renowned AI hub since arriving at the U of A in 2003.

Reinforcement learning is a branch of machine learning in which AI systems learn to solve problems through a trial-and-error process that mirrors how humans learn. The usefulness of Sutton's visionary research has expanded far beyond computer science, with wide-ranging applications in medicine, economics, engineering and agriculture.

Sutton got his start at Stanford University as an undergraduate studying behavioural psychology. He went on to earn his master's and PhD in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he met longtime collaborator Andrew Barto. In 1998, they published Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which has remained an essential text in the field.

Sutton's impact on Alberta's AI leadership began when he moved to Edmonton to teach at the U of A. From there he went on to serve as Chair of Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence at iCORE/AITF until 2018, and founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he is now a principal investigator. Sutton is also chief scientific advisor at Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

In 2017, he co-founded Google DeepMind Alberta, the company's first international research lab. And in 2023, he announced a partnership with the celebrated video game engineer John Carmack, taking on the role of research scientist at Carmack's Keen Technologies.

Sutton's scientific publications have been cited approximately 175,000 times, and he continues to leave an indelible mark on the field of AI as a mentor. One of his former doctoral students, David Silver, worked with Sutton and Martin Müller to develop AlphaGo, a computer program that defeated the best human Go players in 2016 and 2017.

In 2018, the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association recognized Sutton with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Society of London and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Most recently, he was a co-recipient of the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, the world's most prestigious prize in computing science.