Brief Biography
Richard S. Sutton is research scientist at Keen Technologies,
professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University
of Alberta, chief scientific advisor of the Alberta Machine
Intelligence Institute (Amii), and fellow of the Royal Society of
London, the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Amii, and CIFAR. He received
a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in
1984 and a BA in psychology from Stanford University in 1978. Prior
to joining the University of Alberta in 2003, he worked in industry
at AT&T Labs and GTE Labs, and in academia at the University of
Massachusetts. He helped found DeepMind Alberta in 2017 and worked
there until its dissolution in 2023. At the University of Alberta,
Sutton founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial
Intelligence Lab, which now consists of ten principal investigators
and about 100 people altogether. Sutton is co-author of the
textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, and
his scientific publications have been cited more than 140,000 times.
He is also a libertarian, a chess player, and a cancer survivor.