Dr. John D. Lowrance

Program Director, Representation and Reasoning
Artificial Intelligence Center
SRI International

John D. Lowrance, EJ252	E-mail: lowrance@ai.sri.com
SRI International	URL: http://www.ai.sri.com/~lowrance/
333 Ravenswood Avenue	Phone: (650) 859-5288
Menlo Park, CA 94025	Fax: (650) 859-3735

Research Interests

• Evidential reasoning
• Cognitive aids
• Uncertainty calculi
• Expert systems
• Planning and control methodologies
• Intelligent simulation
• Representations of knowledge
• Application of AI techniques
• Graphical user interfaces
• AI support tools

Representative Research at SRI International (since 1980)

• Contributing architect of PRIME, the Probative Rapid Interactive Modeling Environment, a tool for modeling cause-effect relationships, with socio-cultural aspects, and forecasting plausible effects, expressed as structured arguments
• Contributing architect of Angler (fishing for ideas), a tool to support intelligence & policy professionals engaging in divergent (brainstorming) and convergent (clustering, assessing, and ranking) thinking through collaborative workshops, with participants spatially and temporally distributed
• Contributing architect of LAW, the Link Analysis Workbench, a tool that helps intelligence professionals graphically specify and match patterns of links within large, incomplete, and noisy sets of relational data
• Principal architect of SEAS, the Structured Evidential Argumentation System, a tool to aid analysts, collaboratively engaged in recording, understanding, and comparing analytic arguments
• Contributing architect of Cypress, a tool for developing persistent, real-time, planning and control systems
• Contributing architect of the Act-Editor and GKB-Editor, tools for graphically browsing and editing procedural and declarative knowledge
• Principal architect of Gister, a tool for developing evidential systems that reason from limited probabilistic/fuzzy knowledge and information
• Principal architect of Grasper, a system for manipulating and displaying graphs and for building graph-based user interfaces for knowledge-based systems
• Design and implementation of management decision aids
• Development of techniques for planning military operations
• Design and implementation of techniques for intelligence preparation of the battlefield
• Development of a chest pain diagnosis system
• Design and implementation of techniques for underwater vehicle tracking and sonar data interpretation
• Development of techniques for simulation of a weapons operation center and Naval activities
• Design and implementation of intelligence analysis systems
• Design and implementation of techniques for multi-sensor integration for electronic warfare
• Development of evidential reasoning as a foundation for automated uncertain reasoning, based on the Dempster-Shafer mathematical theory of evidence

Other Professional Experience

• Ph.D. dissertation introduced the AI community to the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence
• Graduate Research Assistant: developed techniques for image understanding; designed and directed the implementation of a VAX/VMS LISP system
• Undergraduate Honors Research: implemented a computer simulation system for modeling continuous processes; designed and implemented a natural language generation system

Representative Publications

• Representative publications (HTML format)
• Representative publications (BibTex format)
• Representative publications (EndNote format)

Academic Background

• Ph.D. in computer and information science (1982), University of Massachusetts
• M.S. in computer and information science (1977), University of Massachusetts
• A.B. in computer science and mathematics (1975), Indiana University

Angler, Act-Editor, Cypress, Gister, GKB-Editor, Grasper, LAW (Link Analysis Workbench), PRIME (Probative Rapid Interactive Modeling Environment), and SEAS (Structured Evidential Argumentation System) are trademarks of SRI International.