ACM Awards Judea Pearl the Turing Award for Work On Artifici
Source: Michael J. Miller
Artificial intelligence has recently seen some great developments: better search engines, improved speech recognition programs, IBM's Watson project, and more.
Underlying all of these advances are models of machine learning. Often, these models are in turn based on mathematical frameworks that enable algorithms that incorporate real world experiences and human reasoning created by Judea Pearl, professor emeritus at UCLA.
Today, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that its annual A.M. Turing Award―generally considered the highest honor in computer science―will be awarded to Dr. Judea Pearl for his work on the partnership between humans and machines, part of what is generally known as artificial intelligence. In particular, Pearl is recognized for creating a framework for reasoning with imperfect data that has changed how people approach real-world problem solving.
ACM Executive Director John White told me that "Pearl's research was instrumental in moving machine-based reasoning from the rules-bound expert systems of the 1980s to a calculus that incorporates uncertainty and probabilistic models." In other words, he has figured out methods for trying to draw the best conclusion, even when there is a degree of uncertainly. It can be applied when trying to answer questions from a large amount of unstructured information, or trying to figure out what someone has said in languages that have lots of similar-sounding words―all things we do a lot today.
Vinton Cerf, an Internet pioneer and a former Turing Award recipient, explained that "Judea Pearl persisted in his deep analysis of Bayesian methods to extract useful information from partial data. In the face of skepticism, he persevered and, ultimately, his work has had enormous impact, not only on the theoretical basis for computational reasoning but in a very real sense, the basis for the successful business models of companies that search the World Wide Web."
In addition, Cerf said Pearl's work "is applicable to an extremely wide range of applications in which only partial information is available to draw upon to reach conclusions."
Pearl is known for his early work on heuristic search, basically a trial-and-error method of problem solving, which he detailed in his 1984 book Heuristics: Intelligent Search Strategies for Computer Problem Solving.
He also created the framework for what he called Bayesian networks (named for eighteenth century mathematician Thomas Bayes), which provides a compact way of representing probability distributions. In this way, it mimics the neural activities of the human brain. This led to Pearl's 1988 book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference, which is widely considered one of the foundations of modern AI research.
This framework has significantly changed approaches to machine learning, which now relies heavily on probabilistic and statistical inference. It underlies most of the systems for recognition, fault diagnosis, and machine translation.
Pearl has studied causality, articulating what actions lead to other actions, as defined in his Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, an influential text in knowledge-based systems.
A graduate of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, with advanced degrees from Rutgers University and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Pearl has worked for UCLA since 1970, and was director of the school's Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is also President of the Board of Directors of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son, the late Wall Street Journal reporter.
The A.M. Turing Award, named after famed computer pioneer Alan Turing, has been awarded by the ACM annually since 1966, and has gone to a number of the luminaries in computer science. You have likely heard of some of the past winners, such as Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, GUI pioneer Alan Kay, mouse creator Doug Engelbart, and C creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. Others are recognized mainly by those within the computer science field, though their research has typically impacted many of us.
White describes the winners as people who have done "great research that has had real and sustained impact" in computing. The Turing Award carries a $250,000 prize, supported by Intel and Google. To celebrate the centennial of Turing's birth, the ACM is holding an event on June 15 and 16 with 34 of the Turing Award winners.
| }
|