Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Office Hours

About the series

Welcome to the IIS Office Hours: Celebrating Reinforcement Learning and the Turing Award

Hosts for this office hour:

Michael Littman, Division Director, CISE/IIS

During this office hour, the focus will be reinforcement learning. The ACM recently announced the 2025 Turing Award, sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of Computing, to Dr. Andrew Barto, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Richard Sutton, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, Canada for “developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.” The impacts of this technology are wide-ranging - from chatbots to state-of-the-art game-playing to personalized recommendations to robot control. The influence of Barto and Sutton’s work extends far beyond computer science and artificial intelligence, forging crucial connections between reinforcement learning and brain sciences—including cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. Barto’s contributions were made possible through a series of NSF-funded projects that sustained AI research long before its recent boom. His research was supported through grants from NSF programs including the National Robotics Initiative, Robust Intelligence, Collaborative Research in Computation Neuroscience, Human-Centered Computing, Biology and Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, which have driven the long-term, fundamental advances in machine learning that we see today.

This is a proud moment that highlights NSF’s contributions to this important area of computing research. In celebration, IIS will host an office hour on Thursday Match 27, 2025 at 12:00-1:00pm with our own Michael Littman who will explain what reinforcement learning is, trace its history, and articulate its past, current, and speculate on its future course.