Judea Pearl, 2011 ACM Turing Award Recipient

Abstract

This is an oral history interview with Judea Pearl created in partnership by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum, in connection with his A.M. Turing Award in 2011. See https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm for more details. Pearl was interviewed by David C. Brock on 2022-07-26 in Encino, CA. Copyright held by Computer History Museum, distributed by permission.

In this interview, Judea Pearl discusses his life and long career. He begins by recounting his family background, and then his youth and education in Israel.

Next, Pearl discusses his army service, experience of a kibbutz, and his technical education as an undergraduate at the Technion. He also discusses his wife, the software developer Ruth Pearl, whom he met at the Technion. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to the United States, where Pearl studied electrical engineering while working. He discusses his work at RCA’s Sarnoff Laboratory and his PhD, both in superconducting electronics, at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to California in the mid 1960s, with Ruth Pearl working at TRW and he at Electronic Memories. With the rise of semiconductor electronics, Pearl decided to move into software and secured a faculty position at UCLA, where he has remained ever since. He recounts his moves into statistics and artificial intelligence at UCLA, and details his route to the development of Bayesian Networks. Pearl details his work on Bayesian Networks, and the trajectory of his work on causal reasoning. The interview concludes with Pearl’s reflections on his work, the state of artificial intelligence research, and his involvements with the Daniel Pearl Foundation and issues related to Israel.