Congratulations to Professor Andrew G.Barto, fellow of AAIA, on winning the 2025 ACM Turing Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Andrew G. Barto, University of Massachusetts Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences professor emeritus, the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of a branch of artificial intelligence known as reinforcement learning (RL).

The honor is awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” It carries a $1 million prize, for which Google Inc. provides the financial support, and is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the foundations of computing more than 70 years ago.

Barto shares the award with his former UMass Amherst Ph.D. student, Richard S. Sutton, now professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, research scientist at Keen Technologies and a Fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii).