Judea Pearl (Hebrew: יהודה פרל; born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American electrical engineer, computer scientist, and philosopher. He is best known for promoting the use of probability in artificial intelligence and for creating Bayesian networks. He also developed a theory to explain cause and effect using structural models. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) gave Pearl the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for his work on artificial intelligence that helped create a way to calculate probabilities and causes. Pearl has written several books, including Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference and The Book of Why, which explains ideas about cause and effect to the general public.

Judea Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl, a journalist who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan linked to Al-Qaeda and the International Islamic Front in 2002.

Biography

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine, in 1936. His parents, Eliezer and Tova Pearl, were Polish Jewish immigrants who raised him in Bnei Brak. His grandfather, Chaim Pearl, was one of the founders of Bnei Brak. On his mother’s side, Judea is a descendant of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces and living on a kibbutz, Pearl decided to study engineering in 1956. He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Technion in 1960. That same year, he moved to the United States to continue his education. He received an M.S. in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1961. Later, he earned an M.S. in physics from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) in 1965.

Pearl worked at RCA Research Laboratories (now SRI International) in Princeton, New Jersey, on projects involving superconductive parametric amplifiers and storage devices. He also worked at Electronic Memories, Inc., on advanced memory systems. When semiconductors "wiped out" Pearl’s work, as he later described, he joined UCLA’s School of Engineering in 1970 and began research on probabilistic artificial intelligence. He is one of the founding editors of the Journal of Causal Inference.

Today, Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. He and his wife, Ruth, have three children. As of 2011, he is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.

Former Israeli Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, collaborated with Judea Pearl on the documentary With My Whole Broken Heart.

Murder of Daniel Pearl

In 2002, Daniel Pearl, a journalist working for the Wall Street Journal and the son of Judea Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. This event led Judea Pearl and other family members and friends to establish the Daniel Pearl Foundation. On the seventh anniversary of Daniel's death, Judea wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil: When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?"

Emeritus Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks quoted Judea Pearl's beliefs in a lesson on Judaism: "I asked Judea Pearl, father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, why he was working for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims. He replied with heartbreaking lucidity, 'Hate killed my son. Therefore, I am determined to fight hate.'"

Views

Pearl describes his religious beliefs as being a "practicing disbeliever," meaning he does not follow a religion but participates in Jewish traditions, such as celebrating holidays and performing the Friday night kiddush. He is a member of the international advisory board for NGO Monitor, an organization located in Jerusalem that tracks the activities of non-governmental organizations from a perspective that supports Israel.

Research

Judea Pearl is known for helping create the basics of modern artificial intelligence, allowing computer systems to handle uncertainty and connect causes to effects. He was among the first to develop Bayesian networks and use probability in artificial intelligence. Pearl also introduced mathematical methods for studying cause and effect in scientific research. His work aims to model how people think at a high level. He has studied topics such as the philosophy of science, how knowledge is represented, unusual types of logic, and learning. UCLA professor Richard E. Korf called Pearl "one of the giants in the field of artificial intelligence." The Association for Computing Machinery said Pearl’s work on causality changed how people understand cause and effect in statistics, psychology, medicine, and social sciences.

• A summary of Pearl’s scientific achievements in order of when they happened was written by Stuart J. Russell in 2012.
• The ACM created an annotated list of Pearl’s work in 2012.
• A video explaining Pearl’s major contributions to artificial intelligence is available here.
• Articles written by Pearl about Jewish identity, the war on terrorism, and the Middle East conflict can be found here.

• Heuristics, Addison-Wesley, 1984
• Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, Morgan-Kaufmann, 1988
• Pearl, Judea (2000). Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Cambridge University Press.
• I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, Jewish Lights, 2004. (Winner of a 2004 National Jewish Book Award)
• Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer (with Madelyn Glymour and Nicholas Jewell), Wiley, 2016. ISBN 978-1-119-18684-7. A previous overview: Causal inference in statistics: An overview, Statistics Surveys, 3:96–146, 2009.
• Pearl, Judea; Dana Mackenzie (2018). "The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect," Science, 361 (6405): 855. Bibcode: 2018Sci…361..855. DOI: 10.1126/science.aau9731.