“The Science of Cause and Effect”
Judea Pearl, Ph.D.
2011 Recipient, A. M. Turing Award
Post-lecture discussion panelists: Katherine Ibister, NYU Game Center and NYU/Poly Computer Science Department; Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, President, NYU/Poly
Fifteenth Annual Lynford Lecture
Introductory Remarks and Panel Introduction by Jeffrey Lynford
November 4, 2013
Fellow Trustees, President Sreenivasan, members of the faculty, students and honored guests:
At this annual gathering for the past 15 years it has been my role to present some historical perspective and contemporaneous context for our guest lecturer and his presentation. This lecture series was conceived and initiated by Professors Gregory and David Chudnovsky, who are Distinguished Industry Professors here at NYU-Poly, world-class number theorists, and the founders of IMAS (the Institute of Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing), and who you will meet later in the program.
Through their efforts and others in the administration, NYU-Poly students have had the good fortune to meet, listen and learn from a group of distinguished speakers. They have included three Nobel Laureates, a Fields Medalist, a former New York Governor who is the father of our current governor, a U.S. Senator who has gone on to become a renowned Secretary of State, and a New York City Councilman and Brooklynite who has a very high “probability” of being elected our 109th Mayor tomorrow evening.
And now, this afternoon we are happy that our very own NYU-Poly alum, Professor Judea Pearl, joins us. He received his PhD from NYU–Poly in 1965 in Electrical Engineering and has been the recipient of numerous prestigious prizes and “frills,” as he labels them sardonically on his very impressive curriculum vitae.
In 2011 Professor Pearl was the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of Computing. He received this prestigious award for “innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence.”
Alan Mathison Turing was a British logician, cryptographer, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalization to the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which is considered the progenitor of the general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence and with reviving of Bayes’ Rule.
Bayesian networks are derived from Bayes’ Rule or Theorem, which is named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes (who lived from 1701 to 1761). It was he who suggested that by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we could gain new and improved beliefs. Sir Harold Jeffreys, the noted mathematician, has written that Bayes’ Theorem “is to the theory of probability what Pythagoras’s theorem is to geometry.”
Professor Pearl has authored many papers and books on a wide range of interests, which include artificial intelligence, probabilistic and causal reasoning, and is credited with expanding the use of the term Bayesian networks in modern times to emphasize the subjective nature of input information, the reliance on Bayes’ conditioning as the basis for updating the aforesaid information, and the distinction between causal and evidential modes of reasoning. By treating cause and effect as a quantifiable Bayesian belief, Professor Pearl has helped expand the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Professor Pearl credits Bayes for providing the historical basis for his work and today Bayes’ Rule has so many applications from DNA decoding to Homeland Security. It is also credited with breaking the supposedly indecipherable German “Enigma” encryption device during World War II. This ground-breaking work was led by none other than the aforementioned Allen Mathison Turing while he was working at Bletchley Park for the British War office. Thus, it was particularly appropriate for Professor Pearl to receive the Turing Award named after him.
Professor Pearl at this point, may I bring your attention to what I can only conclude is a typographical error on page 14 in your second edition of Causality: Models Reasoning and Inference. There you credit an influential paper authored by the Reverend Bayes in 1763, which if published that year, would have been remarkable, since this was two years after his death.
Today we are gathered to learn more about the Professor’s comprehensive theory of causality, which unifies the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation. Professor Pearl’s work is essential to comprehend meaningful relationships from data, predict effects of actions and policies, assess explanations of reported events, or form theories of causal understanding.
After his presentation, our panelists, Professors Shrout and Isbister, will take the stage with me to ask our esteemed alumnus and lecturer some questions about presentation today and his work more broadly. At that time I will tell you more about each of them.