| Judea Pearl | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1936 (age 75–76) Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine (present-day Israel) |
| Nationality | Israeli American |
| Fields | Computer Science Statistics |
| Alma mater | Technion, Israel Rutgers University, U.S. Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, U.S. |
| Known for | Artificial Intelligence Causality Bayesian Networks |
Judea Pearl (born 1936) is a computer scientist and philosopher, best known for developing 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 method of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models (see article on causality).
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 being American and Jewish.[1][2]
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Judea Pearl received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel, in 1960, a Master degree in Physics from Rutgers University, U.S., in 1965, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, 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. He then joined UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1970, where he is currently a professor of Computer Science and Statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He and his wife, Ruth had three children. In addition, as of 2011[update], he is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.[3]
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.[4] 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?.[5]
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.[6] 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.[7]