Textbook of AI

1936–, Computer scientist, philosopher of causation

Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist whose 1988 book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference introduced Bayesian networks, directed acyclic graphs encoding the conditional-independence structure of a joint probability distribution, and belief propagation, the message-passing inference algorithm. The framework gave AI a principled, scalable way of reasoning under uncertainty and reshaped both AI and statistics.

Pearl's later work on causal inference, set out in Causality (2000, second edition 2009) and The Book of Why (2018, with Dana Mackenzie), introduced the do-calculus for reasoning about interventions, structural causal models, and a precise distinction between observation, intervention and counterfactual. The framework has reshaped epidemiology, social-science methodology and parts of machine learning, and has had a quieter but growing influence on fairness and interpretability research.

Pearl received the 2011 Turing Award for his contributions to AI through probabilistic and causal reasoning. He has been a vocal critic of mainstream machine learning's neglect of causal questions. His son Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal journalist murdered in Pakistan in 2002; the Daniel Pearl Foundation continues his work.