Judea Pearl | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Israeli American |
Alma mater | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology New Jersey Institute of Technology Rutgers University New York University Tandon School of Engineering |
Known for | Artificial Intelligence Causality Bayesian Networks |
Spouse | |
Children | 3, including Daniel |
Awards | IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1999) Turing Award (2011) [1] Rumelhart Prize (2011) Harvey Prize (2011) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2021) [2] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science, statistics |
Thesis | Vortex Theory of Superconductive Memories (1965) |
Doctoral advisor | Leonard Strauss Leonard Bergstein |
Doctoral students | Rina Dechter, Hector Geffner, Elias Bareinboim |
Website | http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html |
Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-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). In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the 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] [3] [4] [5] He is the author of several books, including the technical Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference , and The Book of Why , a book on causality aimed at the general public.
Judea Pearl is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan connected with Al-Qaeda and the International Islamic Front in 2002 for his American and Jewish heritage. [6] [7]
Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine, in 1936 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents. [8] He is a descendant of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk on his mother's side. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces and joining a kibbutz, Pearl decided to study engineering in 1956. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Technion 1960. That same year, he emigrated to the United States and pursued graduate studies. He received an M.S. in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1961, and went on to receive an M.S. in physics from Rutgers University and a PhD in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) in 1965. [9] He worked at RCA Research Laboratories (now SRI International) in Princeton, New Jersey on superconductive parametric amplifiers and storage devices and at Electronic Memories, Inc., on advanced memory systems. [9] When semiconductors "wiped out" Pearl's work, as he later expressed it, [10] he joined UCLA's School of Engineering in 1970 and started work on probabilistic artificial intelligence. He is one of the founding editors of the Journal of Causal Inference.
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 [update] , he is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor. [11]
Former Israeli Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, partnered with Judea Pearl in the documentary With My Whole Broken Heart. [12] [13]
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. [14] 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?. [15]
Emeritus Chief Rabbi 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.'" [16]
On his religious views, Pearl states that he is a "practicing disbeliever." [17] [18] He is very connected to Jewish traditions such as holidays and kiddush on Friday night. [19]
Judea Pearl is credited for "laying the foundations of modern artificial intelligence, so computer systems can process uncertainty and relate causes to effects." [2] He is 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. [20] 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. [21]
Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.
Trygve Magnus Haavelmo, born in Skedsmo, Norway, was an economist whose research interests centered on econometrics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1989.
Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, research scientist at the Inria Paris, and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence.
Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in the biomedical sciences. Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.
Vasant G. Honavar is an Indian-American computer scientist, and artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, data science, causal inference, knowledge representation, bioinformatics and health informatics researcher and professor.
Saul Amarel was a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, and best known for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI). He also had a career as a scientist, engineer, and teacher. He was a contributor to advanced computing and AI methodologies, both applied to scientific inquiry as well as engineering practice.
Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, United States. and a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge of multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge (logic), and theoretical computer science.
IEEE Intelligent Systems is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the IEEE Computer Society and sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), British Computer Society (BCS), and European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).
Ruzena Bajcsy is an American engineer and computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also director emerita of CITRIS.
Dana S. Nau is a Professor of Computer Science and Systems Research at the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science in College Park, where he has done research in automated planning and scheduling, game theory, cognitive science, and computer-aided engineering. He has many PHD students, including Qiang Yang who graduated in 1989. He has more than 300 publications and several best-paper awards. Some of his accomplishments include the discovery of game tree pathology, the development of the SHOP and SHOP2 HTN planning systems, and the book Automated Planning: Theory and Practice (ISBN 1-55860-856-7). He is a Fellow of the AAAI and in 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of the AAAS.
Lydia E. Kavraki is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.
In statistics, econometrics, epidemiology, genetics and related disciplines, causal graphs are probabilistic graphical models used to encode assumptions about the data-generating process.
Rina Dechter is a distinguished professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is on automated reasoning in artificial intelligence focusing on probabilistic and constraint-based reasoning. In 2013, she was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Causal AI is a technique in artificial intelligence that builds a causal model and can thereby make inferences using causality rather than just correlation. One practical use for causal AI is for organisations to explain decision-making and the causes for a decision.
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)I turned secular at the age of 11, by divine revelation. [Laughs.] I was standing on the roof of the house my father built, looking down on the street and suddenly it became very clear to me that there is no God.
I'm, of course, prisoner of my upbringing, which means my store of metaphors comes from the Bible and comes from history of the Jewish people. But I don't believe in God. Actually, I know there isn't [a] God.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: location (link)Did you pray for Danny's safe return? No, I don't believe in a God [that] would listen to me. But I do pray every morning. I lay tefillin. I started a year ago. But aren't you a secular Jew? I'll give you the same answer I gave 10 Muslims who joined me for dinner one Friday night. I said, 'Oh, it's Friday night. I have to do Kiddush.'