Turing laureate Judea Pearl turns 90, honored for twice revolutionizing AI research
zacharylipton · x · 2026-09-08
Researcher Zachary Lipton recounted a Sunday gathering celebrating Judea Pearl's 90th birthday. Pearl transformed AI twice: leading the field's probabilistic turn in the 1980s with Bayes nets and d-separation, then delivering the systematic treatment of causal identification and do-calculus in the 1990s–2000s. Daphne Koller and Eric Horvitz attended, with video tributes from Nobel laureates; the event was curated by Elias Bareinboim. Lipton framed Pearl as one of AI's great 'neats,' hoping the next wave of rigor-minded researchers — human or machine — draws on his life's work.
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