Judea Pearl, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been elected as Fellow of the American Statistical Association. The organization's fellows selection committee can elect up to one-third of one percent of the total association membership as fellows each year.
Pearl, who is also a professor of statistics, was elected for his “seminal contributions to causal inference in statistics, including formal models of causal knowledge, fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning, and advocating for causal thinking within the profession and the general public.”
He is one of the pioneers of Bayesian networks and the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, and one of the first to mathematize causal modeling in the empirical sciences. He has also contributed to the philosophy of science, knowledge representation, human cognition and machine learning.
Pearl has been a UCLA faculty member since 1970. He received the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, for his landmark work in processing information under uncertainty. In 2018, he was one of three emeriti faculty who received UCLA’s Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award, which recognizes distinguished achievements following retirement. He also is the author of a recently published book about the science of causality.
The association will recognizes this year’s new class of fellows on July 30, at the Joint Statistical Meetings, to be held in Denver.
