Judea Pearl (Hebrew: יהודה פרל; born September 4, 1936, in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, present-day Israel) is an Israeli-American electrical engineer, computer scientist, and philosopher working in the fields of computer science and statistics. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), earned master's degrees from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, and received his PhD in 1965 from New York University (Polytechnic Institute of New York University) for his dissertation "Vortex Theory of Superconductive Memories" advised by Leonard Strauss and Leonard Bergstein. His doctoral students include Rina Dechter, Hector Geffner, Elias Bareinboim, and Karthika Mohan.

Pearl is best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, developing Bayesian networks (and belief propagation), and formulating a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models, structural equation modeling, and the Pearl vortex. He is the author of several books, including the technical work Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference and The Book of Why, a book on causality aimed at the general public. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning".^[1,21,2] His other recognitions include the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1999), the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2003), the Rumelhart Prize (2011), the Harvey Prize (2011), and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2021).^[1,2]

Pearl was married to Ruth Pearl (née Eveline Rejwan) from 1960 to 2021 and has three children. He is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2002 by terrorists and militants in Pakistan linked to Al-Qaeda and the International Islamic Front for being American and Jewish.^[5]

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine, in 1936 to Eliezer and Tova Pearl, who were Polish Jewish immigrants, and grew up in Bnei Brak. His grandfather Chaim Pearl was one of Bnei Brak's founders, and he is a descendant of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk on his mother's side.^[7,47,9] After serving in the Israel Defense Forces and joining a kibbutz, Pearl decided to study engineering in 1956 and received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Technion in 1960. That same year, he emigrated to the United States and pursued graduate studies, receiving an M.S. in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1961, an M.S. in physics from Rutgers University, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) in 1965.^[10]

He worked at RCA Research Laboratories (now SRI International) in Princeton, New Jersey on superconductive parametric amplifiers and storage devices, and at Electronic Memories, Inc., on advanced memory systems.^[4] When semiconductors "wiped out" Pearl's work, as he later expressed it, he joined UCLA's School of Engineering in 1970 and started work on probabilistic artificial intelligence. Pearl is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, and is one of the founding editors of the Journal of Causal Inference.

He and his wife, Ruth, had three children. In addition, as of 2011, he is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.^[12,11] Former Israeli Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, partnered with Judea Pearl in the documentary With My Whole Broken Heart.^[13]

In 2002, his son, Daniel Pearl, a journalist working for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, leading Judea, other family members, and friends to create the Daniel Pearl Foundation.^[15,14] On the seventh anniversary of Daniel's death, Judea wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil: When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?. Emeritus Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks quoted Judea Pearl's beliefs in a lesson on Judaism: "I asked Judea Pearl, father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, why he was working for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims...he replied with heartbreaking lucidity, 'Hate killed my son. Therefore I am determined to fight hate.'"^[16]

Regarding his religious views, Pearl states that he is a "practicing disbeliever."^[17] He is very connected to Jewish traditions such as holidays and kiddush on Friday night.^[20,19] Pearl sits on the international advisory board of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based right-wing organization that reports on non-governmental organization activity from a pro-Israel perspective.

Pearl is credited for "laying the foundations of modern artificial intelligence, so computer systems can process uncertainty and relate causes to effects."^[22] He 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. His work is also intended as a high-level cognitive model, and he is interested in the philosophy of science, knowledge representation, nonstandard logics, and learning. Pearl is described as "one of the giants in the field of artificial intelligence" by UCLA computer science professor Richard E. Korf. According to the Association for Computing Machinery, his work on causality has "revolutionized the understanding of causality in statistics, psychology, medicine and the social sciences."^[48,23]

A summary of Pearl's scientific contributions is available in a chronological account authored by Stuart J. Russell in 2012. An annotated bibliography of Pearl's contributions was also compiled by the ACM in 2012. Additionally, a video describing Pearl's major contributions to AI is available. Pearl's opinion pieces, addressing Jewish identity, the war on terrorism, and the Middle East conflict, can also be accessed.

His authored books include Heuristics, published by Addison-Wesley in 1984, and Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, published by Morgan-Kaufmann in 1988. He subsequently published Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference with Cambridge University Press in 2000. In 2004, Jewish Lights published I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, which won a 2004 National Jewish Book Award. Following an earlier survey titled "Causal inference in statistics: An overview" in Statistics Surveys (3:96–146, 2009), he co-authored Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer with Madelyn Glymour and Nicholas Jewell, published by Wiley in 2016 (ISBN 978-1-119-18684-7). In 2018, he published The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect with Science.

Judea Pearl received the RCA Laboratories Achievement Award in 1965, and was later elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1988 and a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1990. He became a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 and served as UCLA's 81st Faculty Research Lecturer in 1996. Pearl was awarded the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in Artificial Intelligence in 1999, followed by a Classic Paper Award from the AAAI in 2000 and the Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2001. He was named a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain in 2002, delivered the Pekeris Memorial Lecture at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2003, and received the ACM Allen Newell Award in 2004.

In 2006, Pearl received another AAAI Classic Paper Award and was awarded the Purpose Prize alongside Akbar Ahmed. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Toronto in 2007, followed in 2008 by the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computers and Cognitive Science from The Franklin Institute and an Honorary Doctorate from Chapman University. In 2010, Pearl delivered the Otis Dudley Duncan Memorial Lecture for the American Sociological Society and was celebrated with a festschrift and symposium, which yielded the volume "Heuristics, Probability and Causality: A Tribute to Judea Pearl," edited by R. Dechter, H. Geffner, and J.Y. Halpern. In 2011, he was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame, received the David E. Rumelhart Prize, and was named a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. Pearl won the ACM Turing Award in 2012, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the Harvey Prize from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. In 2013, he was honored with a special issue of the Cognitive Science Journal, gave the IMS Medallion Lecture at JSM-2013, and delivered the 15th Annual Lynford Lecture alongside receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award from NYU-Polytechnic.

Pearl was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received an Honorary Doctorate from Texas A&M University in 2014. In 2015, he was named an ACM Fellow, received Carnegie Mellon University's Dickson Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from the institution, and won a Classic Paper Award from the Artificial Intelligence Journal. He was presented with the Sells Award for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement by the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 2016. In 2018, Pearl won the American Mathematical Society's Ulf Grenander Prize and the UCLA Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award, and was awarded honorary doctorates by Yale University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2019. In 2020, Pearl was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, earned another Classic Paper Award from the Artificial Intelligence Journal, and was recognized as a Great Immigrants Awards honoree by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. His subsequent honors include the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2021, the Test of Time Award from the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in 2023, the Kampe De Feriet Award from the Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty (IPMU) in 2024, and election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2025.

External links related to Judea Pearl include the Daniel Pearl Foundation, as well as entries 70481 and 595. Additional materials include an interview with Daniel Greene on September 27, 2007, "Robots and the Illusion of Free Will" on The Science Network on July 22, 2011, and an interview conducted by Lex Fridman in December 2019.