Congratulations to Judea Pearl, who was awarded the Edward Dickson Emeritus Professorship for his work on causality that is revolutionizing the empirical sciences.

The Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award is funded from a gift endowment established by the late Edward A. Dickson, Regent of the University of California, to honor outstanding research, scholarly work, teaching, and service performed by an Emeritus or Emerita Professor since retirement.

Three UCLA emeriti professors have been selected to receive the 2017 – 2018 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award, which includes a prize of $5,000: Professor Emeritus William A. V. Clark, Professor Emerita Rita Effros and Professor Emeritus Judea Pearl. The awards will be presented at the UCLA Emeriti Association annual dinner.

Judea Pearl, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, is a world-renowned computer scientist who has made extraordinary contributions to artificial intelligence, information science, philosophy, statistics, health science, social science and cognitive science. Since his retirement, in July 1994, Judea’s research accomplishments have increased markedly, both in volume and in impact, resulting in hundreds of scientific articles, 13 Ph.D. graduates, two seminal books, many accolades and numerous awards. In particular, his recent work on causal inference has revolutionized the way scientists in almost every discipline view and process cause-effect relationships in their respective fields. His book Causality has won the 2001 Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics as “the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science.” The methods outlined in Causality have affected the entire spectrum of the empirical sciences, from robotics and machine learning to epidemiology, psychology, econometrics and social science. Causality has received more than 12,000 scientific citations according to Google Scholar, 5,500 of them in the past five years alone. Judea has been called “the most original and influential thinker in statistics today,” and he has received many national and international awards, notably the 2011 ACM Alan M. Turing Award, which is widely regarded as the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science,” for “fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.”

Learn more about the Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship here.