rich sutton head (Evolutionary Portrait Art by Günter Bachelier)

Richard S. Sutton

Professor and iCORE chair
Department of Computing Science
University of Alberta
2-21 Athabasca Hall
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E8

office 3-13 Athabasca Hall 780-492-4584
cell 780-270-8139 fax 780-492-1111
email sutton@cs.ualberta.ca or rich@richsutton.com
web http://richsutton.com
ichat/aol name rssutton@mac.com (do not use this for an email address)
This site is mirrored at http://incompleteideas.net/sutton and http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton
RLAI book cover
I am seeking to identify general computational principles underlying what we mean by intelligence and goal-directed behavior. I start with the interaction between the intelligent agent and its environment. Goals, choices, and sources of information are all defined in terms of this interaction. In some sense it is the only thing that is real, and from it all our sense of the world is created. How is this done? How can interaction lead to better behavior, better perception, better models of the world? What are the computational issues in doing this efficiently and in realtime? These are the sort of questions that I ask in trying to understand what it means to be intelligent, to predict and influence the world, to learn, perceive, act, and think.
Just Foreign Policy Iraqi Death Estimator