Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist, currently working as a professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

at Case Western Reserve University. He is known for having supplied first-hand biographical information on

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...

about his time in

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only ...

. Previously, he has been a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and

University of Illinois Springfield The University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) is a public university in Springfield, Illinois. The university was established in 1969 as Sangamon State University by the Illinois General Assembly and became a part of the University of Illinois ...

Biography

Loui earned his Bachelor's degree from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in Applied Mathematics in 1982. Loui earned his Ph.D. under

Henry E. Kyburg Henry E. Kyburg Jr. (1928–2007) was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Fl ...

, at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants Undergraduate education, undergraduate and graduate degrees, including Doctorate, do ...

and completed a postdoc at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

between 1987 and 1988 under Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky. From 1988 to 2008, he was an associate professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis in the School of Engineering, having been tenured in 1994. He was also associated with multiple departments outside of Engineering, as well as several research centers. While at WashU, He organized the first Harvard internet alumni club and built a citation-based search engine for legal opinions in the early 1990s. He left academia for a few years to join industry. Between 2012 and 2015, he was an assistant professor at

. Loui is a leading advocate of defeasible reasoning in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

and a leading proponent of scripting languages. 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. This was a key technology sought by the

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

Information Awareness Office and Disruptive Technology Office under

Total Information Awareness Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office. It operated under this title from February to May 2003 before being renamed Terrorism Information Awareness. Based on the conce ...

. Loui also consulted for Cyc, a famous

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

program created by

Doug Lenat Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning p ...

. Loui supervised students in a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

Research Experiences for Undergraduates program that produced several current professors of computing, and the author of the original

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

search engine.

References

External links

Prof. Loui's old academic web site

List of Prof. Loui's papers and citations

Some of Prof. Loui's awk programs at awk.info

A comic book character based on Professor Loui
in an Obama biography by J. Mariotte {{DEFAULTSORT:Loui, Ronald 1961 births Living people Punahou School alumni People from Honolulu Washington University in St. Louis faculty University of Illinois at Springfield faculty Google people Case Western Reserve University faculty Harvard College alumni University of Rochester alumni