Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Judea Pearl (UCLA) - The New Science of Cause and Effect

Speaker: Professor Judea Pearl, UCLA

Talk Title: The New Science of Cause and Effect

Series: Computer Science Colloquium

Abstract: Professor Judea Pearl's talk will summarize a revolution that has changed the way scientists deal with cause-effect questions and that will have profound effects on our future. Pearl will first describe how hard causal questions that long were regarded as
either metaphysical or unmanageable can now be solved using elementary steps and what this tells us about how our mind achieves causal understanding. He will then outline how robots can be built that learn to communicate in our language of cause and effect and reason counterfactually about credit and blame, regret, intent and responsibility.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

This talk is co-sponsored by: USC Viterbi Department of Computer Science, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC Marshall Department of Data Sciences and Operations and USC Dornsife Department of Economics.


Biography: Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, where he directs the Cognitive Systems Laboratory and conducts research in artificial intelligence, human cognition, and philosophy of science. Pearl is the 2011 recipient of the ACM Alan Turing Award, and the 2002 London School of Economics Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science. He is the author of Heuristics (1983), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), Causality (2000, 2009) and most recently co-authored The Book of Why (2018).


Host: Computer Science Department and School of Communication in Annenberg

Location: Wallis Annenberg Hall (ANN) 106 (Sheindlin Forum)

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Computer Science Department