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]
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 [5] His unpublished work was cited in Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, while referring to economist John Harsanyi).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, 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 ]