NYU-Poly Alumnus Judea Pearl Wins Prestigious Turing Award

Judea Pearl, PhD ’65 EE, has been named winner of the annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize in Computing," recognizing Pearl for his advances in probabilistic and causal reasoning. His work has enabled creation of thinking machines that can cope with uncertainty, making decisions even when answers aren't black or white.

Among his many awards, Pearl is the recipient of the 2011 Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from Technion—Israeli Institute of Science and Technology, and the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computers and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute. Pearl is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is the director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. Pearl has also been a public figure in recent years as president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, formed after his son Daniel was killed by terrorists in 2002 while working for the Wall Street Journal as a journalist.