Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium/AI

Speaker/A

ffiliation: Judea Pearl/University of California Los Angeles

Date/

Time: Monday October 20 2008 11:00 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Hosts: Ben Kuipers and Vladimir Lifschitz

Talk Title: The Fou

ndations of Causal Inference

Talk Abstract:
I will review concep

ts principles and mathematical
tools that were found useful in applic

ations involving
causal inference. The principles are based on structur

al-
model semantics in which functional (or counterfactual)
relatio

ns represent physical processes. This semantical
framework enriched wi

th a few ideas from logic and graph
theory gives rise to a complete c

oherent and friendly
calculus of causation that unifies the structural
graphical
and potential-outcome approaches to causation and
resol

ves long-standing problems in several of the empirical
sciences. These

include questions of confounding causal
effect estimation policy anal

ysis legal responsibility effect
decomposition instrumental variable

s and the integration of
data from diverse studies.

Speaker Bio

:
Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics
at

the University of California Los Angeles. He joined the faculty
of UCL

A in 1970 where he currently directs the Cognitive Systems
Laboratory

and conducts research in artificial intelligence human
reasoning and p

hilosophy of science. He has authored three books:
Heuristics (1984) P

robabilistic Reasoning (1988) and Causality
(2000). A member of the Na

tional Academy of Engineering and a
Founding Fellow the American Assoc

iation for Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI) Judea Pearl is the recipient
of the IJCAI Research Excellence
Award for 1999 the London School of

Economics Lakatos Award for
2001 the ACM Alan Newell Award for 2004 a

nd the 2008 Benjamin
Franklin Medal of Computer and Cognitive Science f

rom the Franklin
Institute.