Actual Causality: A Survey

Logo
Presented by

Joe Halpern

About this talk

The Causal AI Conference 2022: Actual Causality: A Survey Joe Halpern Professor - Computer Science, Cornell University What does it mean that event C “actually caused” event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order to determine responsibility. What exactly was the actual cause of the car accident or the medical problem? The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since the days of Hume, in the 1700s. Many of the definitions have been couched in terms of counterfactuals. C is a cause of E if, had C not happened, then E would not have happened. In 2001, Judea Pearl and I introduced a new definition of the actual cause, using Pearl’s notion of structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition has been revised twice since then, extended to deal with notions like “responsibility” and “blame”, and applied in databases and program verification. In this talk, Joe will survey the last 15 years of work, including collaborations with Judea Pearl, Hana Chockler, and Chris Hitchcock. Learn more and join the community here: https://www.causalaiconference.com/ 00:00 - Welcome 00:15 - Actual Causality: A Survey 44:35 - Q&A
Related topics:

More from this channel

Upcoming talks (0)
On-demand talks (18)
Subscribers (674)
causaLens is the pioneer of Causal AI—a giant leap in machine intelligence. Today’s machine learning algorithms extract correlations from data and predict outcomes based on patterns in past data. Correlations are useful for making predictions, but they’re of little use for decisions. Causal AI goes beyond predictions by understanding the actual causes behind an outcome and quantifying the impact of different interventions. It is the only form of machine intelligence that can answer “Why?”. causaLens builds Causal AI-powered products that empower all users to make superior decisions and drive business value. Leading organisations across a wide range of industries trust causaLens with their most important decisions.