Faces of HPC: Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl is a recipient of the ACM Turing award for his work developing the probabilistic approach in artificial intelligence and the Bayesian networks.
Introduction
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, widely known for his revolutionary work on artificial intelligence, causality and Bayesian networks. He has received many awards, including the highest award in computer engineering, the ACM Turing award.
Biography
Judea Pearl was born in 1936 in Tel-Aviv, Israel, to Polish-immigrant parents. He received his Bachelor degree from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering in 1960. He continued his education in the United States studying a Masters degree in the same field at Newark College of Engineering, graduating in 1961. In 1965 he finished his doctorate on electrical engineering and a Master’s degree in Physics from Rutgers University of Brooklyn.
After his studies, Pearl joined RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, as a researcher on superconductive parametric and storage devices and Electronic Memories, based in California, as a researcher on advanced memory systems. He changed his focus to artificial intelligence in 1969, when he joined UCLA's School of Engineering. Pearl is best known for his contribution to the development of Bayesian networks and the theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models.
Pearl is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and the Director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. He is also a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor. In 2011, he received the highest distinction in computer engineering, the ACM Turing award, for his ‘fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning’.
Resources
http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/judea-pearl-5354.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl
http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm