John Lowrance

John D Lowrance, PhD

Program Director

Artificial Intelligence Center

SRI International

Menlo Park, California, USA.

Email: lowrance-at-ai.sri.com

See: http://www.ai.sri.com/~lowrance

Dr. John D. Lowrance has been a member of SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center since 1980. He has led and participated in basic and applied research programs in perception, foundations for expert systems, uncertainty calculi for knowledge-based systems, knowledge-based planning methodologies, intelligent simulation, the integration of multi-source knowledge, representations of knowledge, link analysis, and the design and implementation of AI support tools and programming languages. Dr. Lowrance's Ph.D. dissertation introduced the AI community to evidential reasoning, a methodology for representing and reasoning from evidence (i.e., information that is potentially uncertain, incomplete, and inaccurate). He is the former Assistant Director of SRI's AI Center and currently is the Director of that Center's Representation and Reasoning Program. His application-oriented research has developed approaches to multi-sensor integration, knowledge-based simulations, analysis of intelligence data, logistics planning, medical diagnosis, sonar data interpretation, vehicle tracking, forensic accounting, target systems analysis, and management decision aids. In addition, he was the principle architect of Grasper (a programming language that supports interactive graph-processing) and Gister (an evidential-reasoning and argument construction tool). Dr. Lowrance's most recent work is aimed at making evidential reasoning accessible to real world analysts and decision makers. As such, he has been the technical and managerial lead in the development of SEAS (a tool to aid intelligence analysts in recording, understanding, and comparing analytic arguments), along with Angler (a tool to promote divergent and convergent thinking), and LAW (a link analysis tool that finds close matches for graphically specified patterns). Dr. Lowrance received his A.B. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Indiana University, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Lowrance has numerous publications in conference proceedings, journals, and books since 1974. - (source: http://www.ai.sri.com/people/lowrance/)