Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton - Episode 80
From ACM ByteCast by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
January 14, 2026 · 43 min · Episode 80
About this episode
Rashmi Mohan hosts Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, discussing their contributions to reinforcement learning and their collaboration.
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureates Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton. They received the Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, a computational framework that underpins modern AI systems such as AlphaGo and ChatGPT. Barto is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His honors include the UMass Neurosciences Lifetime Achievement Award, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, and the IEEE Neural Network Society Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS. Sutton is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies (an artificial general intelligence company) and Chief Scientific Advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). In the past he was a Distinguished Research Scientist at Deep Mind and served as a Principal Technical Staff Member in the AI Department at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory. His honors include the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence…
People in this episode
Host: Rashmi Mohan
Guests: Andrew Barto, Richard Sutton
Topics covered
- reinforcement learning
- artificial intelligence
- Turing Award
- collaboration
- academic achievements
Keywords
- reinforcement learning
- AI systems
- Turing Award
- AlphaGo
- ChatGPT
- academic collaboration
- machine intelligence
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Keen Technologies, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Deep Mind, AT&T Shannon Laboratory, Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, AAAS, IJCAI, Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association
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