Ronald Loui

Ronald Loui
Born	1961 (1961) Honolulu, Hawaii, US
Occupation	Adjunct Professor
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Rochester
Thesis	Theory and Computation of Uncertain Reasoning and Decision  (1987)
Doctoral advisor	Henry E. Kyburg Jr.

Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist and adjunct professor of computer science at Case Western Reserve University. He previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis and University of Illinois Springfield.

Biography

Loui grew up in Hawaii, where he was a classmate of Barack Obama at Punahou School. ^{[1] [2]} He went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in applied mathematics in 1982, where his undergraduate thesis won an ACM award. ^[3]

Loui completed a Ph.D. advised by Henry E. Kyburg Jr., at the University of Rochester and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford (1987–1988) under Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky. ^[4] His doctoral work was cited in Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, while referring to economists John Harsanyi and Daniel Kahneman. ^[5]

From 1988 to 2008, he was a professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis in the McKelvey School of Engineering. ^[6] He was also associated with multiple departments outside of engineering. ^{[7] [8]} While at Washington University, he built a reference class-based statistical reasoner (rd), programs that could reason argumentatively (nathan, lmnop), a social network for Harvard alumni (hserver), and a citation-based search engine for legal opinions (room5), with students in the early 1990s. ^{[4] [ citation needed ]} After leaving Washington University in 2008, he worked as a full-time consultant for several years. He co-founded the disinformation-detection startup Peak Metrics after several years doing similar research for US intelligence and defense, and now teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Case Western Reserve University.^{[ citation needed ]}

Loui has published papers on defeasible reasoning in artificial intelligence ^[9] and he is a proponent of scripting languages. ^[10] 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. ^[11] 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.^{[ citation needed ]}

References

1. Kaste, Martin (2012-10-12). "Hawaii Prep School Gave Obama Window To Success". NPR. Retrieved 2025-06-05.
2. Obama's link to Hawaii not ignored by islanders - The Washington Post, Apr 30, 2013
3. George E. Forsythe Award, 1983 shared, "Optimal paths in graphs with stochastic or multidimensional weights," CACM 26:9, 1983.
4. "Professor Loui's Home Page at Washington University in St. Louis" . Retrieved February 23, 2012.^{[ permanent dead link ]}
5. Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, 1988, p. 282 "Harsanyi and Loui include computational considerations as part of the pragmatics of belief acceptance."
6. "Ronald Loui - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.mathgenealogy.org. Retrieved 2022-08-21.
7. Journal of Philosophy v 90 no. 3, 1993.
8. "Ronald Prescott Loui". Docslib. Retrieved 2022-08-21.
9. Loui, R. P. (1987). "Defeat among arguments: a system of defeasible inference" . Computational Intelligence. 3 (1): 100–106. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8640.1987.tb00178.x. ISSN   1467-8640.
10. "In Praise of Scripting," IEEE COMPUTER, 2008.
11. "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.