Artifact Details

Title

Pearl, Judea oral history

Catalog Number

102792724

Type

Document

Description

In this interview, Judea Pearl discusses his life and long career. He begins by recounting his family background, and then his youth and education in Israel. Next, Pearl discusses his army service, experience of a kibbutz, and his technical education as an undergraduate at the Technion. He also discusses his wife, the software developer Ruth Pearl, whom he met at the Technion. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to the United States, where Pearl studied electrical engineering while working. He discusses his work at RCA’s Sarnoff Laboratory and his PhD, both in superconducting electronics, at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to California in the mid 1960s, with Ruth Pearl working at TRW and he at Electronic Memories. With the rise of semiconductor electronics, Pearl decided to move into software and secured a faculty position at UCLA, where he has remained ever since. He recounts his moves into statistics and artificial intelligence at UCLA, and details his route to the development of Bayesian Networks. Pearl details his work on Bayesian Networks, and the trajectory of his work on causal reasoning. The interview concludes with Pearl’s reflections on his work, the state of artificial intelligence research, and his involvements with the Daniel Pearl Foundation and issues related to Israel.

Date

2022-07-26

Contributor

Brock, David C., Interviewer

Pearl, Judea, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Encino, CA, USA

Extent

35 p.

Format

PDF

Subject

Turing Award; ACM; Pearl, Ruth; Pearl, Daniel; Israel; Technion; electrical engineering; Newark College of Engineering; Polytechnic Institue of Brooklyn; Superconducting Electronics; Electronic Memories; UCLA; Software; artificial intelligence; Bayesian Networks; Casual Reasoning; Danieal Pearl Foundation; Machine learning

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit