Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference.
![Judea Pearl, University of California at Los Angeles [image courtesy ACM]](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/pearl.jpg "Judea Pearl, University of California at Los Angeles [image courtesy ACM]")
Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited three of his seminal papers, which had been presented at past AAAI conferences and that presaged the hierarchy of processes — probabilistic, causal, and counterfactual — that formed a trajectory of his research and a focus of his talk: “Reverend Bayes on Inference Engines: A Distributed Hierarchical Approach” from the second annual AAAI conference; and “Symbolic Causal Networks” with Adnan Darwiche and “Probabilistic Evaluation of Counterfactual Queries” with Alexander Balke, both from the 12th annual AAAI conference (more following the link…).
