This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Judea Pearl receives the ACM Turing Award 2011 on 16 June, 2012. He was chosen by ACM for his contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence, most notably probabilistic and causal reasoning.
The Turing Award is one of the most prestigious awards in the field, often considered the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. ACM, the Association for Computer Machinery, began giving out the award in 1966, whose first recipient was Alan Perlis. The award was named after Alan Turing, who is widely considered the father of computer science and Artificial Intelligence. Other winners include Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Yoshua Bengio, Geofrrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun, all that made enormous contributions to computer science and Artificial Intelligence.
Judea Pearl is a renowned Israeli-American computer scientist. He is a pioneer into Baynesian networks, probabilistic approaches to AI, and causal inference. He is also known for his books, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems (1988), Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000), and The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (2018). Pearl is a Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA.
Due to the impact that Judea Pearl had on Artificial Intelligence, specifically in terms of Causal Inference, the History of AI initiative considers it an important marker in AI history. Professor Judea Pearl is one of the most influential computer scientists around the world. He is also a Mentor of AI World Society Innovation Network (AIWS.net). Professor Pearl resides on the History of AI Board. He was honored as 2020 World Leader in AI World Society by Michael Dukakis Institute and the Boston Global Forum.