Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist, currently working as an adjunct professor of computer science at Case Western Reserve University. He is known for having supplied first-hand biographical information on Barack Obama about his time in Hawaii.[1][2][3]

Biography

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Loui earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in applied mathematics (1982), where his undergraduate thesis won an ACM award.[4]

Loui completed a Ph.D. advised by Henry E. Kyburg Jr., at the University of Rochester and completed a postdoc at Stanford (1987-1988) under Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky.[5] His unpublished work was cited in Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, while referring to economist John Harsanyi).[6]

From 1988 to 2008, he was a professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis in the McKelvey School of Engineering.[7] He was also associated with multiple departments outside of engineering, including publishing a Journal of Philosophy article in the same issue as Willard Van Orman Quine.[8][9] While at Washington University, he built a citation-based search engine for legal opinions in the early 1990s.[5] After leaving Washington University in 2008, he worked as a full-time consultant for several years, and then joined University of Illinois Springfield as a faculty member. He left academia for a few years in 2017 to co-found Peak Metrics, which does disinformation detection for the US Defense Department, and now teaches as an adjunct faculty at Case Western Reserve University.

Loui is an advocate of defeasible reasoning in artificial intelligence[10] and a proponent of scripting language.[11] He is co-patent holder of a deep packet inspection hardware device that could read and edit the contents of packets as they stream through a network.[12] This technology was sought by the DARPA Information Awareness Office and Disruptive Technology Office under Total Information Awareness. Loui also consulted for Cyc, a well-known artificial intelligence program created by Douglas Lenat.

Loui supervised students in a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program that produced several current professors of computing, and the author of the original Google search engine, Scott Hassan.[citation needed]

References

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  1. ^ Ramos, Connie (2008). "Our Friend Barry: Classmates' Recollections of Barack Obama and Punahou School"
  2. ^ Yes We Can: A Biography of Barack Obama by Garen Thomas, 2008
  3. ^ Obama's link to Hawaii not ignored by islanders - The Washington Post, Apr 30, 2013
  4. ^ George E. Forsythe Award, 1983 shared, "Optimal paths in graphs with stochastic or multidimensional weights," CACM 26:9, 1983.
  5. ^ a b "Professor Loui's Home Page at Washington University in St. Louis". Retrieved February 23, 2012.
  6. ^ Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, 1988, p. 282 "Harsanyi and Loui include computational considerations as part of the pragmatics of belief acceptance."
  7. ^ "Ronald Loui - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.mathgenealogy.org. Retrieved 2022-08-21.
  8. ^ Journal of Philosophy v 90 no. 3, 1993.
  9. ^ "Ronald Prescott Loui". Docslib. Retrieved 2022-08-21.
  10. ^ e.g. J. Klinger's thesis abstract, "the most significant scientists in the field among others Dung, Pollock, Loui, Prakken", Tech. U. Munich, 2023.
  11. ^ "In Praise of Scripting," IEEE COMPUTER, 2008.
  12. ^ "Methods, systems, and devices using reprogrammable hardware for high-speed processing of streaming data to find a redefinable pattern and respond thereto – US Patent 7093023 Abstract". Patentstorm.us. Archived from the original on June 12, 2011. Retrieved March 16, 2011.
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