Judea Pearl has won the 2011 A.M. Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning." Pearl pioneered the use of Bayesian networks and causal modeling as an approach to reasoning with uncertain knowledge and made man other contributions to probabilistic approaches to artificial intelligence. He has been a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA since 1970.

The Turing Award is ACM's most prestigious technical award and given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. The award is sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of Computing and is named in honor of the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing.