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John D. Lowrance
Program Director, Representation and Reasoning
Artificial Intelligence Center
SRI International
[email protected]
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 incorrect). 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 evidentialreasoning 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 (see http://www.ai.sri.com/~lowrance).