Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl
יהודה פרל
Judea Pearl at NIPS 2013
Born (1936-09-04) September 4, 1936
Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine
(present day Israel)
NationalityIsraeli
American
EducationIsrael Institute of Technology (BS)
New Jersey Institute of Technology (MS)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (MS)
New York University (PhD)
Known forArtificial Intelligence
Causality
Bayesian Networks
Structural Equation Modeling
Spouse
Ruth Pearl (née Eveline Rejwan)
(m. 1960; died 2021)
Children3, including Daniel
AwardsIJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1999)
Turing Award (2011)
Rumelhart Prize (2011)
Harvey Prize (2011)
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2021)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science, statistics
ThesisVortex Theory of Superconductive Memories (1965)
Doctoral advisorLeonard Strauss
Leonard Bergstein
Doctoral studentsRina Dechter, Hector Geffner, Elias Bareinboim
Websitehttp://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html

Judea Pearl (Hebrew: יהודה פרל; 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". 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.