Abbeel is considered the leader of his generation in RL, especially as it pertains to robotics. His work on trust-region policy optimization provided the first reliable RL procedure for continuous control, as showcased on simulated robotic environments. Further from there, Abbeel has made several other pioneering contributions to Deep RL for robotics. These contributions include generalized advantage estimation, which enabled the first 3D robot locomotion learning; soft-actor critic, which is one the most popular Deep RL algorithms to-date; domain randomization, which showcases how learning across appropriately randomized simulators can generalize surprisingly well to the real world; and hindsight experience replay, which has been instrumental for Deep RL in sparse-reward/goal-oriented environments.

Congratulations to Pieter Abbeel who has been awarded the ACM Prize in Computing for his contribution to robot learning, including learning from demonstrations and deep reinforcement learning for robotic control. Pieter's research has covered the following: Pieter Abbeel is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and the Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientist at Covariant, an AI robotics company. He also hosts the The Robot Brains podcast. The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes an early- to mid-career fundamental, innovative contribution in computing that, through its depth, impact and broad implications, exemplifies the greatest achievements in the discipline. The award carries a prize of $250,000.

Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning where an agent (e.g., a computer program) seeks to progress towards a reward (e.g., winning a …

As my term as ACM President draws to an end, I have been reflecting on my time serving our organization. It is easy to get lost in the day-to-day demands of this position, losing sight of what we have been able to accomplish during the past two years. We have accomplished a lot. A clear highlight for me and for many was the 50th Turing celebration last year. Honoring our Turing Laureates and bringing together so many who have profoundly shaped our field, the event featured panels on key topics in computing, all of which can be viewed at https://www.acm.org/turing-award-50/video.