Program Director Emeritus, Artificial Intelligence Center
John D. Lowrance, Ph.D., is a program director emeritus in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. His most recent work is aimed at making evidential reasoning accessible to real world analysts and decision makers. 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), LAW (a link analysis tool that finds close matches for graphically specified patterns), and PRIME (a tool for modeling cause-effect relationships and forecasting plausible effects).
Previously, Lowrance 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 multisource knowledge, representations of knowledge, link analysis, and the design and implementation of AI support tools and programming languages.
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). His application-oriented research has developed approaches to multisensor 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 principal architect of Grasper (a programming language that supports interactive graph processing) and Gister (an evidential reasoning and argument construction tool).
Lowrance received his AB in computer science and mathematics from Indiana University, and M.S. and Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Massachusetts. He has numerous publications in conference proceedings, journals, and books since 1974.
Publications
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Toward Culturally Informed Option Awareness for Influence Operations with S-CAT
The Socio-Cultural Analysis Tool (S-CAT) is being developed to help decision makers better understand the plausible effects of actions taken in situations where the impact of culture is both significant and subtle.
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Capturing Culture and Effects Variables Using Structured Argumentation
We describe the intended use of S-CAT on an illustrative use case, and discuss our use of structured argumentation as a representation technique to capture both culture variables and effects variables.
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Template-Based Structured Argumentation
Collaborative analysis is supported via simultaneous access to arguments through web browser clients connected to a common argument server.
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A Framework for Evidential-Reasoning Systems
Both the formal basis and a framework for the implementation of automated reasoning systems based upon these techniques are presented. The formal and practical approaches are divided into four parts.
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Graphical Manipulation of Evidence in Structured Arguments
A semiautomated approach to evidential reasoning uses template-based structured argumentation. Graphical depictions convey lines of reasoning, from evidence through to conclusions.
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Computer-Mediated Collaborative Reasoning and Intelligence Analysis
We introduce a framework spanning the entire collaborative thought process using the Angler and SEAS (Structured Evidential Argumentation System) applications. Angler encourages creative brainstorming while SEAS demands analytical reasoning. The dual nature of this approach suggests substantial benefits from using computer-mediated collaborative and structured reasoning tools for intelligence analysis and policymaking.