Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, philosopher, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), renowned for his pioneering contributions to artificial intelligence, particularly in the development of Bayesian networks, belief propagation algorithms, structural causal models, and probabilistic approaches to AI. Born on September 4, 1936, in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Technion in Haifa (1958), an M.S. from Rutgers University (1960), and a Ph.D. from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (1965). He joined UCLA in 1970, where he established the Cognitive Systems Laboratory and became a professor of computer science and statistics. His work earned him the Turing Award in 2011, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2015, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering (1989). He is the author of influential books including 'Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems' (1988), 'Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference' (2000), and 'The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect' (2018). Tragically, he is also known as the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal journalist murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, an event that profoundly impacted his personal life and led him to advocate for journalism ethics and interfaith dialogue. His work continues to shape fields like machine learning, philosophy, and economics, emphasizing causality over correlation.