Interview with Judea Pearl, Turing Award Winner, Graphical Probability Pioneer

Pearl's attempt to filter out uncertainty and noisy data has profound implications for many applications, including AI, machine learning, and natural language processing.

ACM, May 8, 2012

Stephen Ibaraki interviews Judea Pearl, winner of the 2011 ACM most prestigius Turing Award.

Download or Listen to it here.

The interview reveals the fascinating role of philosophy and empirical science in Pearl's work, which encompasses probability, causality, and counterfactual thinking. Pearl discusses the influence of education on his success and the challenges of educating future generations. He also illuminates his interests in cognitive science, computation, and physics as well as his work at RCA Research Laboratories, and the transition into academia.

Stephen delves into how Judea's attempt to filter out uncertainty and noisy data has profound implications for a variety of applications. Among them are machine reasoning, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, statistics, philosophy, psychology, epidemiology and social science.

Dr. Pearl is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory, and a recipient of numerous other awards, including the 2003 Allen Newell Award from ACM and the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). Learn more about him on his ACM Turing Award page.