Richard S. Sutton

Richard Stuart Sutton is an American-Canadian computer scientist and professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, and chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, known for temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods. He took a bachelor degree in psychology at Stanford in 1978 and a master and doctorate in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under Andrew Barto, whose supervision led to his work on actor-critic architectures. He worked at GTE Laboratories and AT&T Labs before joining Alberta in 2003, and later spent several years at Google DeepMind. In 2019 he published the essay known as the bitter lesson on the power of general methods that use computation. In 2024 he shared the Turing Award with Barto for work on reinforcement learning.