The Carnegie Corporation of New York has named Judea Pearl, chancellor’s professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, as a 2020 honoree of its annual Great Immigrants program.
The list, released by the philanthropic foundation every July since 2006, recognized naturalized U.S. citizens who “have enriched and strengthened our nation and our democracy through their contributions and actions.”
Among this year’s 38 honorees are Talking Heads’ front man David Byrne, author Yaa Gyasi, CNN political commentator Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, and Advanced Micro Devices president and CEO Lisa Su.
Pearl, who was born in Israel, is one of the pioneers of Bayesian networks and the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, and one of the first to mathematize causal modeling in the empirical sciences. He has also contributed to the philosophy of science, knowledge representation, human cognition and machine learning.
Since 1970, Pearl has been a UCLA faculty member and also holds an appointment in statistics. He has received many major international honors for his work, including the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, which is often considered the Nobel Prize of computing, from the Association for Computing Machinery for his landmark work in processing information under uncertainty.