Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on belief propagation).

In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning".

After serving in the Israel Defense Forces and joining a kibbutz, Pearl decided to study engineering in 1956.

Pearl is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA.

[21] Judea Pearl is credited for "laying the foundations of modern artificial intelligence, so computer systems can process uncertainty and relate causes to effects."

[2] He is one of the pioneers of Bayesian networks and the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, and one of the first to mathematize causal modeling in the empirical sciences.

Pearl is described as "one of the giants in the field of artificial intelligence" by UCLA computer science professor Richard Korf.