Judea Pearl Wins ‘Nobel Prize in Computing’
Judea Pearl, father of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has been named winner of what is considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” a prestigious honor that also carries a $250,000 award.
The Association for Computing Machinery announced Thursday it would give its 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award to Pearl, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for his pioneering work. The association said in a press statement that Pearl’s innovations “enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence.” In particular, his work created a foundation for processing information under uncertain circumstances, and created methods that enable machines to reason about actions and observations and assess cause and effect.
The prize is named for a British mathematician, Alan M. Turing. It will be given to Pearl in June at an ACM conference in San Francisco that will also gather previous prize winners as part of a centenary celebration of Turing.
In February in New York, Pearl delivered the “state of anti-Semitism” lecture, an annual speech sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance.
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