By Don Clark

Humans have always made inferences about causes and effects, sometimes based on scanty information. Many machines do now, too, and Judea Pearl is frequently cited as a cause.

The computer scientist on Thursday is being named as the latest recipient of the high-prestige Turing Award, which is awarded annually by the Association of Computing Machinery. It comes with a $250,000 prize, provided with financial support from Google and Intel.  Pearl, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, is credited by the ACM with developing key theoretical foundations in the field known as artificial intelligence.

To Vint Cerf, the Internet pioneer who now works at Google and helped lead the award-selection process, the importance of Pearl’s work is not artificial but extremely practical–underlying many kinds of widely used technology, including speech-recognition systems, machine translation and the way Google serves up ads to Web surfers based on partial evidence it gleans about their interests.

“Most significantly, his work was looked at with great skepticism by many colleagues,” says Cerf, a past Turing award winner himself. “But he persisted in the face of skepticism and ultimately the work was of stunning value.”

Read the article by Don Clark

February 23, 2012, NoJitter announced the six finalists in the Best of Enterprise Connect 2012 competition. Link to complete article

* Sococo: Sococo Team Space for iPad, which extends Sococo’s immersive business communications experience so that coworkers can stay–and feel–connected throughout the day, no matter where they’re located.

Said Eric Krafp: “The judges (listed below) clearly were impressed by innovative customer service/contact center solutions. I think one of the mega-trends we’ll see in communications over the next few years is the transition to true multimedia contact centers that integrate brick-and-mortar facilities with online stores, and that tie all the various media together. Right now, that’s still a nascent capability and contact centers aren’t well organized to take advantage of it. But that’s evolving, as our contest shows.

“Also, Vidyo is becoming a fixture on our Finalist list; they’re an innovative company and video has arrived as a consideration for all communications networks. It may not be on every desktop, but it simply can’t be ignored by anyone who’s charged with designing and building the enterprise networks of the future.

“Finally, we got some network management in the mix, which is great, because network management is so important and yet so often overlooked.”

Their judges this year were:

* Doug Carolus, Senior Associate, Pace Harmon
* Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research
* Marty Parker, Prinicipal, UniComm Consulting
* Sorell Slaymaker, President, Unified IT Systems
* David Stein, President, Stein Technoloy Group

“They’ll be meeting with each of the Finalists over the next week to hear about their products in greater detail, to help the judges pick a winner for this year’s Best in Enterprise Connect. The award will be presented at Enterprise Connect Orlando on March 28.”