Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist, currently working as a 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, 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University of Rochester and completed a postdoc at Stanford (1987-1988) under Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky.[5] His unpublished work was cited in Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, while referring to economist John Harsanyi).[6]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 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. 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 languages.[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 Doug 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.