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  Subject:   Searching for the Actual Cause

  Sponsor:   Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision

  Speaker:   Judea Pearl

  Date:   Wednesday, May 10, 2000

  Time:   4:15pm - 5:15pm

  Location:   TCseq201, Lecture Hall B [look for it in a campus map]

  Event URL:   http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/spring00/abst-pearl.html

  Sponsor URL:   http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

  Costs:   0.

  Contact:   bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
	     http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

			       Abstract

Many problems in troubleshooting, legal decisions, and natural
language processing require one to identify the "actual cause" of an
event in the context of a given scenario (as in: ``Socrates drinking
hemlock was the actual cause of Socrates death.'') Following a brief
review of counterfactuals and their structural semantics, I will
propose a formal account of actual causation based on the notion of
"sustenance" -- the capacity of the cause to sustain the effect
despite certain "structural" changes in the model. I will show by
examples how this account avoids problems associated with the
counterfactual-dependence account of Lewis (1986) and how it can be
used both in generating explanations of specific scenarios and in
computing the probabilities that such explanations are in fact
correct.

References

Parts of this talk are based on chapter 10 of CAUSALITY (Cambridge
U. Press, 2000), on my IJCAI-99 Lecture (see
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~judea/) and on recent joint work with
J. Halpern.

About the Speaker

Judea Pearl received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Technion,
Haifa, Israel, in 1960. In 1965 he received both a Master's degree in
Physics from Rutgers University and Ph.D. degree in Electrical
Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Before coming
to UCLA, he worked at RCA Research Laboratories, Princeton, New
Jersey, on superconductive parametric and storage devices and at
Electronic Memories, Inc., Hawthorne, California, on advanced memory
systems. Judea joined UCLA in 1970. He has many awards, including the
IJCAI Research Excellence Award in Artificial Intelligence (1999). His
current interests include artificial intelligence and knowledge
representation, probabilistic and causal reasoning, nonstandard
logics, and learning strategies.

 Event history: Submitted by aarati on 28-Apr-2000;

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