Ronald Loui


Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist and philosopher identified as "Frederick" in U.S. President Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father memoir, the first classmate the ten-year-old Obama meets at Punahou School. Loui appears in Obama biographies, national and international newspaper articles, in online columns, in a film documentary, on NPR and on Fox TV news. In cartoon form, he appears as Obama's childhood sidekick in the comic biography by Jeff Mariotte. Loui is the first friend named and quoted by Obama in his memoir. In a radio interview, Loui explained that his brother Terrence was really the first person who welcomed Obama and his grandfather to Punahou.

Biography

Loui was a leading advocate of defeasible reasoning in artificial intelligence and a leading proponent of scripting languages.
He was co-patentor of a deep packet inspection hardware device that could read and edit the contents of packets as they stream through a network. This was a key technology sought by the DARPA Information Awareness Office and Disruptive Technology Office under Total Information Awareness. Loui also consulted on Cyc, a famous Artificial Intelligence program devised by Doug Lenat.
Loui organized the first Harvard internet alumni club and built a citation-based search engine in the early 1990s.
He earned his Ph.D. under Henry E. Kyburg, and spent postdoctoral time at Stanford under Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky.
Professor Loui supervised students in a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program that produced several current professors of computing, and the author of the original Google search engine.