This year's Turing Award is an honor known as the “Computer Award” that awarded two AI researchers who laid the foundation for technological breakthroughs such as OpenAI's GPT. Andrew Barto, a researcher at the University of Amherst, Massachusetts, and Richard Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, will share a $1 million bonus, which is now announced (March 5).
Named after British mathematician Alan Turing, the award award was awarded a cash prize for financial support from Google (GOOGL) and is offered annually by the Association of Computers (ACM). Past winners include AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann Lecun, who won the 2018 Turing Award for their work in artificial neural networks.
Barto and Sutton received this year’s awards for their contribution to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines. “Their work has been an advancement in AI over the past few decades,” Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean said in a statement. “The tools they develop remain central to the AI boom and have made significant progress, attracting young researchers and driving billions of dollars in investment.”
The duo worked with Umass Amherst in 1978, and Barto served as Sutton's Ph.D. and postdoctoral consultant. Over the next few years, they collaborated on numerous papers that shaped key algorithms and reinforcement learning techniques and published the 1998 textbook Reinforcement Learning: Introductionhas been cited more than 75,000 times and remains a standard reference in the field.
ACM President Yannis Ioannidis noted that although their work happened decades ago, it is still more important than ever. “Barto and Sutton's work is not a stepping stone to keep going now,” he said in a statement. Their research paves the way for enhanced learning to be used in major AI milestones such as Alphago, an in-depth system for human GO players who won victory in 2016 and 2017; and Chatgpt, a pioneering technology released by Openai in 2022.
Is AI moving too fast?
Despite their long-term involvement in the emergence of AI, Turing recipients this year are cautious about the rapid growth of emerging technologies. According to Barto, companies should prioritize security and testing over commercial pressures, he told the Financial Times, “Release software to millions of people without security is not a good engineering practice.”
Barto is currently a professor of information and computer science at UMass Amherst. Sutton teaches computer science at the University of Alberta, serves as the chief scientific consultant at the Alberta School of Machine Intelligence, and is a research scientist at Keen Technologies, a Dallas-based AI company.
Despite warning of the rapid pace of AI, Sutton has taken another security approach to researchers Hinton and Bengio, who have been speaking out about the existence of threats to the technology. Although the researchers are troubled by the potential military applications of AI and the ability to spread misinformation through errors or hallucinations, he is also concerned about strong opposition to highlight its risks. “The oil-filled person is inappropriate and the concern is excessive,” Sutton said in an interview with Betakit, adding that he is more worried that AI will unfairly blame global problems and lead to “undemonicization” in the field.
