Ronald Loui
Encyclopedia
Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist and philosopher identified as "Frederick" in U.S. President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

's Dreams From My Father
Dreams from My Father
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by United States President Barack Obama. It was first published in July 1995 as he was preparing to launch his political career, five years after being elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in...

memoir, the first student the ten year-old Obama meets at Punahou School
Punahou School
Punahou School, once known as Oahu College, is a private, co-educational, college preparatory school located in Honolulu CDP, City and County of Honolulu in the U.S. State of Hawaii...

. Loui also appears in Obama biographies by Garen Thomas, David Remnick
David Remnick
David Remnick is an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named "Editor of the Year" by Advertising Age in 2000...

, Constance Ramos, Avner Falk
Avner Falk
Avner Falk is an Israeli clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, political psychologist, psychogeographer, psychobiographer, and psychohistorian. He is known for his psychoanalytic studies of Jewish and Israeli leaders, of Jewish history, of the Arab-Israeli conflict, of antisemitism and of...

, in newspaper articles in the Mirror (UK), Akron Beacon Journal, and the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera, US News and DC City Desk online columns, and on Fox TV news. In cartoon form, he appears as Obama's childhood sidekick in the comic biography by Jeff Mariotte
Jeff Mariotte
Jeff Mariotte is an author who currently lives in Arizona with his wife, author Maryelizabeth Hart, and family. As well as his own original work, he is best known for writing novels and comic books based on licensed properties.-Biography:...

. Loui is the first friend named and quoted by Obama in his memoir.

Biography

Loui was a tenured professor at Washington University in St. Louis where he was one of the leading innovators in logic-based artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 for two decades and a leading advocate of defeasible reasoning
Defeasible reasoning
Defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning that is based on reasons that are defeasible, as opposed to the indefeasible reasons of deductive logic...

 and scripting languages.

Loui is co-patentor of a deep packet inspection
Deep packet inspection
Deep Packet Inspection is a form of computer network packet filtering that examines the data part of a packet as it passes an inspection point, searching for protocol non-compliance, viruses, spam, intrusions or predefined criteria to decide if the packet can...

 hardware device that can read and edit the contents of packets as they stream through a network. This was a key technology sought by the DARPA Information Awareness Office
Information Awareness Office
The Information Awareness Office was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to national security,...

 and Disruptive Technology Office
Disruptive Technology Office
The Disruptive Technology Office is a funding agency within the United States Intelligence Community. It was until known as Advanced Research and Development Activity ....

.

Loui also consulted on Cyc
Cyc
Cyc is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning....

, a famous Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 program devised by Doug Lenat that uses logic to reach conclusions based on common-sense facts and principles about the real world.

Loui graduated from Harvard in 1982 with a senior thesis that shared the ACM national prize for best undergraduate paper in computing, earned his Ph.D. under Henry E. Kyburg, and spent postdoctoral time at Stanford.

Professor Loui supervised students in a model National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 Research Experiences for Undergraduates
Research Experiences for Undergraduates
Research Experiences for Undergraduates are competitive summer research programs in the United States for undergraduates studying science, engineering, or mathematics. Such programs usually focus on targeting women and underrepresented minorities...

 program, Washington University's Computer Science SURA Program
Washington University's Computer Science SURA Program
Washington University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering SURA Program served as a model Research Experiences for Undergraduates site for the NSF from 1990-1997 and included many exemplary outcomes, including :* , paper on video on-demand storage servers cited 206 times, Ph.D...

, that included several current professors of computing, and the author of the original Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

search engine.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK