Professor Judea Pearl

University of California

I am humble and honored to be deemed worthy of a title such as Hero.

Judea Pearl is Chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, where he directs the Cognitive Systems Laboratory and conducts research in artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. Pearl was born in Tel Aviv, and received his BS degree from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 1960. He holds a Master degree in Physics from Rutgers University and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from NYU Tandon School of Engineering, both in 1965.

Pearl has authored three seminal books, Heuristics (1983),Probabilistic Reasoning (1988) and Causality (2000, 2009) which won the London School of Economics Lakatos Award in 2002. More recently, he co-authoredCausal Inference in Statistics (2016, wit M. Glymour and N. Jewell) and "The Book of Why" (2018, with Dana Mackenzie) which brings causal analysis to a general audience.

Pearl is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Royal Statistical Society, the Association of Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

In 2012, he won the Technion's Harvey Prize and the ACM Alan Turing Award "for fundamental contribution to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning".

Lecturing to students, Pearl champions the theory that computer science is in a unique position to unify the fields of statistics, philosophy, psychology and economics, all of which are driven by the puzzle: "So, how do people do it" and "doing it" means "computing".