Nobel Prize in Computing

Pearl‘s book on “Causality” has been on my shelf for a while now. I also read it, a few times, but never managed to get through it in one go, cover to cover. Consequently, I haven’t come to grips with all details, implications and equations yet. No reason to worry about my intellectual capabilities, it’s quite fundamental and takes time to sink in. Now Judea Pearl has been awarded the 2011 ACM Turing Award – Congratulations!

The annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” recognizes Pearl for his advances in probabilistic and causal reasoning. His work has enabled creation of thinking machines that can cope with uncertainty, making decisions even when answers aren’t black or white. […]
The UCLA computer science professor is widely credited with coining the term “Bayesian Network,” which refers to a statistical model ACM describes as mimicking “the neural activities of the human brain, constantly exchanging messages without benefit of a supervisor.” Bayesian networks have been used to, among other things, analyze biological data for studies of medicine and diseases.

Here is a chance to see him talk for yourself:

“I compute, therefore I understand” – More videos are here on theScienceNetwork.

found via networkworld.com: Judea Pearl, a big brain behind artificial intelligence, wins Turing Award. See also on the ACM NEWS “Judea Pearl Wins 2011 ACM Turing Award“.

Making Data Work

Just a couple of days ago the O’Reilly STRATA Conference took place, the youtube-playlist of the presentations can be found here. Among them is this excellent talk by …

Ben Goldacre, the physician and  biostatistician behind the always-excellent Bad Science column in the Guardian, gave a barnburner of a talk at Strata 2012 yesterday, “The Information Architecture of Medicine is Broken“. For anyone not aware of the problems caused by publication bias in clinical trials (for example, ineffective drugs with a wide variety of side-effects coming to market), his talk is a must-watch.

(Shared by İbrahim Mutlay via LinkedIn, see also this blog-entry on the topic)

The line “Everybody should have a cousin who is a better Python programmer than oneself” made my day. Enjoy!