In 1977, Barto joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst as a postdoctoral research associate, was promoted to associate professor in 1982, and full professor in 1991. He was department chair from 2007 to 2011 and a core faculty member of the Neuroscience and Behavior program. During this time at UMass, Barto co-directed the Autonomous Learning Laboratory (initially the Adaptive Network Laboratory), which generated several key ideas in reinforcement learning. Barto built a lab in UMass Amherst toward developing the ideas on reinforcement learning while Sutton returned to Canada. Reinforcement learning as a topic continued to develop in academic circles until one of its first major real world applications saw Google's
AlphaGo program built on this concept defeating the then prevailing human champion. Barto and Sutton have widely been credited and accepted as pioneers of modern reinforcement learning, with the technique itself being foundational to the modern AI boom. Barto published over one hundred papers or chapters in journals, books, and conference and workshop proceedings. He is co-author with
Richard Sutton of the book
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, MIT Press 1998 (2nd edition 2018), and co-editor with Jennie Si, Warren Powell, and Don Wunch II of the
Handbook of Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, Wiley-IEEE Press, 2004. == Awards and honors ==