Richard Sutton, PhD

Senior Advisor

Richard Sutton pioneered one of the most powerful techniques of the modern AI revolution: Reinforcement Learning.

He is coauthor of the primary textbook on Reinforcement Learning used by almost all top computer science departments around the world: "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction." His scientific publications have been cited more than 140,000 times.

Richard is a professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, chief scientific advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), research scientist at Keen Technologies, and fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and CIFAR.

At the University of Alberta, Richard founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which consists of ten principal investigators and over 100 researchers. 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.

Richard received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts and a BA in psychology from Stanford University. He is also a libertarian, a chess player, and a cancer survivor.