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
Artificial perception
Application of AI techniques
Graphical user interfaces
AI support tools

Representative Research at SRI International (since 1980)

Development of evidential reasoning as a foundation for automated uncertain reasoning
Design and implementation of techniques for multi-sensor integration for electronic warfare
Design and implementation of intelligence analysis systems
Development of techniques for simulation of a weapons operation center and Naval activities
Design and implementation of techniques for underwater vehicle tracking and sonar data interpretation
Development of a chest pain diagnosis system
Design and implementation of techniques for intelligence preparation of the battlefield
Development of techniques for planning military operations
Design and implementation of management decision aids
Principal architect of Grasper, a system for manipulating and displaying graphs and for building graph-based user interfaces for knowledge-based systems
Principal architect of Gister, a tool for developing evidential systems that reason from limited probabilistic/fuzzy knowledge and information
Contributing architect of the Act-Editor and GKB-Editor, tools for graphically browsing and editing procedural and declarative knowledge
Contributing architect of Cypress, a tool for developing persistent, real-time, planning and control systems
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 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
Contributing architect of Angler, 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

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

Numerous publications on evidential reasoning, multisource fusion, situation assessment, simulation, planning and control, computer perception, graph processing, and C3I appearing in books, journals, conference proceedings, and technical notes since 1974

Academic Background

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

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