Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher best known for developing Bayesian networks and a formal mathematical framework for causal inference, contributions that earned him the 2011 Turing Award.
Bayesian networks
Born in 1936 in Tel Aviv, then part of British Mandate Palestine, Pearl earned degrees in electrical engineering before joining the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has spent most of his career. In the 1980s, as part of the broader effort to build reasoning systems within Symbolic AI and Expert system research, Pearl developed Bayesian networks, graphical models that represent probabilistic dependencies among variables and allow efficient, principled reasoning under uncertainty. His 1988 book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems established Bayesian networks as a standard tool across Artificial intelligence, statistics and related fields, and they remain widely used wherever a system needs to combine uncertain evidence, a concern connected to modern work on Explainable AI.
Causal inference
Pearl's later work extended probabilistic reasoning into a formal theory of causality. He introduced the "do-calculus" and structural causal models, mathematical tools that distinguish correlation from causation and make it possible to ask precise questions such as what would happen under an intervention, or what would have happened counterfactually. His 2018 book The Book of Why, co-written with Dana Mackenzie, popularized this "causal revolution" for a general audience, arguing that a three-level "ladder of causation," association, intervention and counterfactual reasoning, describes distinct kinds of reasoning that purely statistical methods struggle to reach.
Critique of deep learning
Pearl has been an outspoken critic of the idea that scaling Machine learning and Deep learning systems on ever more data is sufficient to reach genuine understanding or Artificial general intelligence, describing much of contemporary statistical learning as "curve fitting" that lacks an explicit causal model of the world. This view places him alongside other prominent skeptics such as Gary Marcus in arguing that hybrid approaches combining structured, causal reasoning with statistical learning are necessary for more robust and generalizable AI systems, and he has continued to press this argument even as large-scale neural systems have achieved results that many in the field once thought would require explicit causal models to reach. Away from computer science, Pearl is also known for founding the Daniel Pearl Foundation in memory of his son, the journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002.