Dominic Cummings has promised to revolutionise the civil service. On his much-discussed and semi-comprehensible blog, Boris Johnson’s consigliere has put out the word: out with the smug Oxbridge mandarins, in with the brilliant weirdos, misfits, data dorks and software gurus.
Those hoping to join Cummings’s Whitehall brains trust are firmly encouraged to familiarise themselves with the work of one Judea Pearl, an Israeli-American computer scientist.
Cummings has blogged repeatedly about Pearl, calling him “one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning”. This is a rare understatement: the 83-year-old is closer to a pioneer.
“I commend him for reading my book. He has good judgment,” says Pearl in a thick Polish-Israeli accent.
The original article can be found here.
In the field of causal reasoning, Professor Judea Pearl is a pioneer for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models. In 2011, Professor Pearl also received the Turing award from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which is the highest distinction in computer science, “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning”. In 2020, Professor Pearl is also awarded as World Leader in AI World Society (AIWS.net) by Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI) and Boston Global Forum (BGF).