1948–, Computer scientist
Also known as: Andrew G. Barto
Andrew Gehret Barto is an American computer scientist who, with his student Richard Sutton, founded modern reinforcement learning. Barto's 1983 paper with Sutton and Charles Anderson, Neuronlike Adaptive Elements That Can Solve Difficult Learning Control Problems, introduced the actor-critic architecture that remains a workhorse of RL theory.
Barto and Sutton's Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (1998, second edition 2018) is the standard textbook of the field. Barto spent his career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he founded the Autonomous Learning Laboratory and supervised a generation of RL researchers. He shares (with Sutton) the 2024 Turing Award.
Related people: Richard Sutton
Works cited in this book:
- Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd edition) (2018) (with Richard S. Sutton)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 1: What Is AI?, A Brief History of AI