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Judea Pearl Wins Turing Award

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-hearty-handshake dept.

alphadogg writes "Judea Pearl, a longtime UCLA professor whose work on artificial intelligence laid the foundation for such inventions as the iPhone's Siri speech recognition technology and Google's driverless cars, has been named the 2011 ACM Turing Award winner. The annual Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the 'Nobel Prize in Computing,' recognizes 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."

4 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. the next step: questioning the humans by ChipMonk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After all, every computer so far trusts that its human programmer(s) have a clue. This bad assumption is the greatest source of uncertainty.

    1. Re:the next step: questioning the humans by digitig · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I seem to remember that COMAL didn't -- at least the BBC B implementation. If it thought that what you'd written wasn't what you meant it would silently change it to what it thought you meant. With the state of AI at that time, that was a pretty serious source of uncertainty.

      --
      Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
  2. He's also the father of Daniel Pearl by MagikSlinger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, this Daniel Pearl.

    --
    The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
  3. Pearl's Rumelhart lecture by davids-world.com · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow, that's big news. I heard him speak last year when he got the Rumelhart prize - the story about how he worked out Bayesian networks is humble. I think, some paper napkins were involved. The whole lecture is archived here: http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/cogsci-2011/rumelhart-lecture-judea-pearl