Judea Pearl, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and a professor at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, will receive the Dickson Prize in Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
The prize, established by the late Dr. Joseph Z. Dickson and his late wife, Agnes Fischer Dickson, is given annually to a person judged to have made an outstanding contribution to science.
Pearl created the computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He has developed methods that enable machines to reason about actions and observations and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves a wide range of applications, and has influenced the understanding of human reasoning and the philosophy of science.
Pearl earned a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Technion in Israel, a master’s degree in physics from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1970. He is a member of the UCLA Computer Science Department, and holds a joint appointment in the statistics department.
Pearl’s many honors include the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, known as the Nobel Prize for computer science, as well as membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
