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DOI: 10.1145/2184319.2184347
Leah Hoffmann
Q&A
A sure Thing
Artificial intelligence pioneer Judea Pearl discusses probability,
causation, the calculus of intervention, and counterfactuals.

configurations, others worked on photochromic memory, and I worked on superconductors, where one could store information in the form of localized circulating vortices.

 

aCM a.M. tUrInG Award winner Judea Pearl took a somewhat unusual path to the field that now celebrates his pioneering achievements in artificial intelligence. Born in Israel in 1936, he grew up in Bnei Brak, a biblical town his grandfather refounded in 1924. After serving in the Israeli army and joining a kibbutz, he decided to study electrical engineering at the Tech-nion-Israel Institute of Technology. (A profile of Pearl, “Game Changer,” appears on p. 22.)

He came to the U.S. in 1960, where
he did graduate studies in physics
and electrical engineering at Rut-
gers University and the Polytechnic
Institute of Brooklyn, and worked at
RCA Research Laboratories. In 1970,
Pearl joined the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles’s (UCLA’s) computer
science department and began the
research for which he has become fa-
mous, creating a representational and
computational foundation for reason-
ing with uncertain information.

you began your career in the 1960s at
rCa research laboratories. What were
you doing there?

I was doing something totally different than what I’m doing now: memory systems. At that time, computers used magnetic-core memories, which were really clumsy. You had to string magnetic donuts with wires, and hundreds of girls strung them one by one. People realized that this was a bottleneck of computers, so everyone was searching for new mechanisms to store information. Some worked on new magnetic

how did you move to academia?

Eventually, everything was wiped out by semiconductors, and people in this arena had to find new jobs. Nothing came out of my Ph.D. dissertation except one piece of analysis that physicists later named “Pearl vortex,” surpassing my wildest dream for immortality. So, looking for another endeavor, I came to the UCLA computer science department and offered my expertise with memory systems. But nothing was done in academia to utilize my experience on the hardware side, so I looked for another challenging arena. And who doesn’t want to emulate him- or herself?

you have said that computer scientists
are driven to the field out of a desire to
emulate and understand themselves.

It’s also why psychologists go into psychology. But we are luckier because we have a mechanism that can really do it. We have a machine that can emulate, [ContInUed on p. 135]

PHoto Gra PHs by rICHard MorGensteIn