Judea Pearl

Professor Judea Pearl is a Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles. He is a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl invented Bayesian networks, presenting a thoroughgoing calculus of probabilistic inference in a book and an important series of papers in the 1980s. His Bayesian networks have had major impact throughout ai and statistics and have played key roles in fields as diverse as computational biology and error-control coding. He is the author of Heuristics: Intelligent Search Strategies for Computer Problem Solving (1984), which provided foundation for three decades of subsequent work on search and planning in AI. Pearl's book on Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2nd ed., 2009) introduces a calculus that enables machines to reason about actions and observations and assists scientists in assessing cause-effect relationships from empirical data. His research serves as the foundation for Google searches, credit-card fraud detection systems, and automated speech recognition systems. Pearl was also awarded the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award (2011).