Professor Judea Pearl, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been elected as an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a professional organization in the United Kingdom. This organization promotes the importance of statistics and data in society.
“Professor Pearl’s impact on statistics has been groundbreaking,” said Deborah Ashby, President of the Royal Statistical Society. “In particular, he is to be commended for his development of a calculus for causal reasoning which has been momentous for both statistics and artificial intelligence.”
Pearl, who also holds a UCLA faculty appointment in statistics, is one of the pioneers of Bayesian networks and the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence as well as one of the first to mathematize causal modeling in the empirical sciences. His accomplishments extend beyond computer science, mathematics and statistics and include contributions to the philosophy of science, knowledge representation, human cognition, and machine learning.
Pearl has been a UCLA faculty member since 1970. He has received many major international honors for his work, including the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, from the Association for Computing Machinery for his landmark work in processing information under uncertainty. In 2019, Pearl was elected as a fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2018, he published a book about the science of causality.