Today, the Association for Computing Machinery has named Dr. Judea Pearl as the recipient of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award (ACM press release), which is widely considered as the $DYNAMITE_PRIZE of computer science. The award was given for Dr. Pearl on his work for 'Develop[ing a] Novel Framework for Reasoning under Uncertainty that Changed How Scientists Approach Real World Problems'.
I have (and have read) Pearl's two major works, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann 1988) and Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (Cambridge UP 2000) and cannot praise them highly enough. Especially the first one has had an enormous impact on AI (though not so much AI & law), these days the Bayesian methods presented in it are quite simply ubiquitous and indispensable. I do have my reservations about their applicability to representing uncertainty in law, but more about that at some other time. (I have read Pearl's 1988 UCLA technical report on Non-Bayesian Formalisms for Managing Uncertainty as well, after all.) For a more sympathetic take on Bayesianism in law, see eg. Law and Truth: A Theory of Evidence by Hannu Tapani Klami, Minna Gräns, and Johanna Sorvettula (The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters 2000).
(via NYT Bits)
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