Richard Sutton, the University of Alberta (U ofA) professor whose research into machine learning helped advance AI, will receive the University of Alberta’s highest honour this March.
“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.”
Nizar Somji, U of A
Sutton, a professor in the university’s Department of Computing Science, is slated to receive an honourary degree from the university at its first winter convocation later this year.
“Honourary degrees are intended to recognize individuals of upstanding character whose contributions are extraordinary and inspirational,” said university chancellor Nizar Somji in a press release. “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.”
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’s leading innovators in AI, advancing the field and having wide-ranging applications across medicine, economics, engineering, and agriculture.
Sutton’s career predates his tenure with the U of A. The Stanford University and University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate published Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction — an essential text in the field — all the way back in 1998. Sutton’s scientific publications have been cited at least 175,000 times.
Born in the midwestern United States, Sutton became a Canadian citizen in 2015 and formally renounced his American citizenship in 2017.
Since then, he’s served as Chair of Reinforcement Learning and AI at iCORE/AITF until 2018 and founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He is also chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.
In the late 2010s, he co-founded Google DeepMind Alberta, the company’s first international research lab, and later partnered with video game engineer John Carmack at Carmack’s Keen Technologies.
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 of the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, the world’s most prestigious prize in computing science.
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