Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl (born 1936, Tel Aviv, Palestine [now Tel Aviv–Yafo, Israel]) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for his “fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence.”

Pearl received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1960 and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1961. He then received a master’s in physics from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in New York (now the Polytechnic Institute of New York University) in 1965. He worked at the David Sarnoff Laboratories of the RCA Corporation (now the Sarnoff Corporation) in Princeton, New Jersey, and on computer memory at the manufacturer Electronic Memories, Inc. (later Electronics Memories and Magnetics Corp.), in Hawthorne, California. He became a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1970.

Pearl introduced the messiness of real life to artificial intelligence. Previous work in the field had a foundation in Boolean algebra, where statements were either true or false. Pearl created the Bayesian network, which used graph theory (and often, but not always, Bayesian statistics) to allow machines to make plausible hypotheses when given uncertain or fragmentary information. He described this work in his book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988).

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Pearl also worked extensively on causality—that is, cause-and-effect relationships—and on a mathematical formalism for describing those relationships. His book on the subject, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000), was influential in many different subjects, including psychology, sociology, medicine, and the philosophy of science.

In January 2002, Pearl’s son, journalist Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, by militant Islamists, and several days later, he was killed by his captors. Later that year, Judea Pearl, his family, and friends of Daniel Pearl founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and Pearl and his wife, Ruth, subsequently coedited the anthology of essays I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (2004).

Pearl’s work after the 1990s concentrated on the role of morality in artificial intelligence, specifically the role of counterfactual statements—that is, a statement where the premise is not true (e.g., “If the car had worked, I would have driven to the store”). He has posited that counterfactual statements are “the building blocks of scientific and moral behaviour” and thus that machines that could understand such statements would be able to take responsibility for their actions.