Biography
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". [ 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. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv , British Mandate for Palestine , in 1936 to Eliezer and Tova Pearl, who were Polish Jewish immigrants, grew up in Bnei Brak . His grandfather Chaim Pearl was one of Bnei Brak's founders. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] 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 ) i Fields: Computer science, statistics Education: Israel Institute of Technology BS New Jersey Institute of Technology MS Rutgers University, New Brunswick MS New York University PhD Award Citation: IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1999) Turing Award (2011) [ 1 ] Rumelhart Prize (2011) Harvey Prize (2011) BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2021) [ 2 ]
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)