Judea Pearl

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Judea Pearl
Born (1936-09-04) September 4, 1936 (age 87)
Tel Aviv, British Palestine
(now the State of Israel)
Nationality Israeli
American
Fields Computer Science
Statistics
Alma mater Technion, Israel
Rutgers University, U.S.
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, U.S.
Thesis Vortex Theory of Superconductive Memories (1965)
Doctoral advisor L. Strauss
L. Bergstein
Known for Artificial Intelligence
Causality
Bayesian Networks
Notable awards IJCAI Award for Research Excellence(1999)
ACM Turing Award (2011)[1]
Rumelhart Prize (2011)
Harvey Prize (2011)
Spouse Ruth
Children Daniel Pearl
Website
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html

Judea Pearl (born 1936) is an Israeli-born American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on belief propagation). He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models (see article on causality). He is the 2011 winner of the ACM Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning".[1][2][3][4]

Judea Pearl is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by militants in Pakistan connected with Al-Qaeda and the International Islamic Front in 2002 for his American and Jewish heritage.[5][6]

Biography

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine, in 1936 and received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion in 1960. In 1960 he came to the United States and received a master's degree in Physics from Rutgers University, U.S. and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering), U.S., in 1965. He worked at RCA Research Laboratories on superconductive parametric and storage devices and at Electronic Memories, Inc., on advanced memory systems. When semiconductors "wiped out" Pearl's work, as he later expressed it,[7] he joined UCLA's School of Engineering in 1970 and started work on probabilistic artificial intelligence.

Pearl is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. He and his wife, Ruth, had three children. In addition, as of 2011, he is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.[8]

On Pearl's religious views, some reports describe him as a Jewish atheist.[9] He is very connected to Jewish traditions such as daily prayer, tefillin, and Kiddush on Friday night. [10] In an interview with Heeb Magazine, he is "... trying to educate our children and live under God.” [11] His writings on morality focus on clarity between right and wrong. [12] He believes that Jews have always expected a return to Israel as expressed in songs, prayers and holidays.[13]

Emeritus Chief Rabbi, The Right Honourable Lord Jonathan Sacks quoted Judea Pearl's beliefs in a lesson on Judaism. "I asked Judea Pearl, father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, why he was working for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims, he replied with heartbreaking lucidity, “Hate killed my son. Therefore I am determined to fight hate.”[14]

Former Israeli Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, and partnered with Judea Pearl in the documentary "With My Whole Broken Heart."[15]

Murder of Daniel Pearl

In 2002, his son, Daniel Pearl, a journalist working for the Wall Street Journal was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, leading Judea and the other members of the family and friends to create the Daniel Pearl Foundation.[16] On the seventh anniversary of Daniel's death, Judea wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil: When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?.[17]

Research

Judea Pearl was one of the pioneers of Bayesian networks and the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, and one of the first to mathematize causal modeling in the empirical sciences. His work is also intended as a high-level cognitive model. He is interested in the philosophy of science, knowledge representation, nonstandard logics, and learning. Pearl is described as "one of the giants in the field of artificial intelligence” by UCLA computer science professor Richard Korf.[18] His work on causality has "revolutionized the understanding of causality in statistics, psychology, medicine and the social sciences" according to the Association for Computing Machinery.[19]

Notable contributions

  • A summary of Pearl's scientific contributions is available in a chronological account authored by Stuart Russell (2012).
  • An annotated bibliography of Pearl's contributions was compiled by the ACM in 2012.

Books

Scientific papers

Lectures

Awards

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See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Judea Pearl – A. M. Turing Award winner, ACM, retrieved 2012-03-14.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Judea Pearl from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected, National Academy of Sciences, April 29, 2014.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Press release source: PRWeb (Vocus).

External links

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