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  Department of Computer Science and Engineering
  Box 1045
  One Brookings Drive
  Washington University in St. Louis
  St. Louis, MO 63130 USA
  314.935.6102(msg) 314.935.7302(fax)
  r.p.loui@gmail.com

  Full CV in pdf
  Short Non-academic CV in pdf

urls stl sch


Ronald P. Loui
 Formerly Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering





Email is r.p.loui@gmail.com. Please note that loui@cs.wustl.edu, loui@cse.wustl.edu, and loui@ai.wustl.edu are deprecated!

NEWS

  • My new Myers-Briggs Personality Test is in beta test, which you are welcome to try here... comments (and deep linking) welcome!


  • Professor Loui was on sabbatical during the 07-08 year, volunteering on the Obama campaign (knocking, walking, phoning, busing, blogging, buying, publishing, emailing, facebooking, interviewing, rallying, donating, reading, writing, rebutting, researching, webposting, wikipedaeing, commenting, pin wearing, flag flying, JoeBidenning, journalist armtwisting, Ohio relocating, cafe chatting, pin distributing, bookgifting, hornhonking, signposting, smiling, thinking, believing, and proudly standing in some very long lines! i.e., just like all the rest of us).


  • Currently I am a full-time consultant for Cycorp in Austin, TX, on loan to the Heart and Vascular Institute at Cleveland Clinic working on natural language interfaces to semantic web databases in health care IT, intelligence, and government.

    My next big personal project might just be an urban center for UNIX excellence here in Cleveland, or an interactive egov site that just does all the IT/DB things that the government will be hemming and hawing about doing in the next four years.


  • Prof. Loui and Prof. Lockwood (now at Stanford) recently completed a contract with SAIC and intelligence agencies developing datamining hardware for internet interventions. While you may have read about similar projects, ours had constant legal oversight and was considered by Congress a project too important to terminate.

  • The company we spun out, GV, was just named Missouri Technology Company of the Year, 2008 (and best start-up a few years back).

  • Congratulations to former intern Scott Hassan for finally getting his due recognition for having written the google prototype, backrub, for fellow Stanford MS students Brin and Page (for example here). Scott got his python from Steve Cousins who mentored him at the Wash U medical libraries group, and I am proud to say I pulled his resume from the pile and placed him in that group with Professor Frisse. I tried my best to get Scott's "unsung-hero" story out there in last month's IEEE Computer article on scripting.

  • Also congratulations to Avie Tevanian, recently CTO of Apple, my fellow grad student at Rochester, who wrote or supervised the development of all of Apple's operating systems since, well, the NeXt days. See, for example, here. Avie is finally leaving Apple, and the company will sadly be a lesser place. We buy stock in Apple because of its stable OS, not because of the iPhone or iTunes.

  • To those who would like Larry Summers' brilliance at Treasury without his bull-in-a-china-shop personality, how about Brad DeLong? Brad co-authored half of his mentor's academic career. Brad is considered just as brilliant as Summers, except that he is better received by his peers. Brad has been preparing himself for Secretary of Treasury since childhood. Brad was even one step away from the position when the Clinton administration ended. He might have been Hillary's top pick, but he was a very early public supporter of Obama. Brad probably has paid all his taxes, too.

  • To a future US Executive CTO:
    Some of the obvious priorities would be to support Treasury, homeland security, defense, and intelligence. The next concerns would be physical infrastructure and human infrastructure, especially education, energy, and long term GDP-economic issues. But eventually the legacy would be creating egovernment that is worthy of our democratic traditions. In 100 years, no one will remember search engines and browsers as a big deal, but people will be talking about how we used those technologies to improve access, deliberation, trust, and oversight to perfect our political institutions. Have a close look at the technologies in AI and Law, where better government use of IT has always been envisioned. HTML, Semantic Web, search engines, and bottom-up interfaces to government all have roots in AI and Law research. Also consider the reestablishment of a UNIX center of excellence for national strategic reasons. And consider a split of the NSF so that engineering research and education are not hindered by a funding model tailored for science (technology is better funded as DARPA/ARDA/DTO, but this funding model need not be specific to defense or intelligence).

    A google for government, yes, but also a youtube for CSPAN, and a facebook for elected officials and bureaucrats, and a wikipedia for legislation, and a public use of wireless spectrum, not just a bunch of placeholders for future speculation.


  • I nominate Avie Tevanian as CTO for the US Government that is, if Apple doesn't need him back asap... He does not currently have an insider agenda to advance (we cannot be picking industry winners and losers with such an appointment). Microsoft would be livid, but it's in no position to protest these days. Steve Case is also a good CTO prospect, though one wonders whether he can look out for the country instead of his investors, first. I am backing Steve Nissen for FDA.

  • On this site, find the phrase "We both would like to thank Francois Bar, Caroline Bradley, Steven Cohen, Joseph Froomkin, Brian Kahin, Tom Kalil, Ronald P. Loui, Paul Romer, Steven Cohen, Carl Shapiro, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, Hal Varian, Janet Yellen, and John Zysman for helpful discussions." And even better here, "We would like to thank Caroline Bradley, Joseph Froomkin, Ronald P. Loui and Lawrence H. Summers for helpful discussions." Actually, thank YOU!

    A couple more easy Technology and Social Prognostications:
    • (Mid-Summer 08) The countries with modern rail systems will dominate the world economy in 50 years. The watercraft is a sustainable large-scale infrastructure technology, and so is the rail network, but commercial aircraft and commuter automobiles are not. Air superiority will remain a strategic technology, but fewer goods and people will be transported by air. Individual volitional landcrafts will have very different scope and infrastructure in the next half century -- some will be recreational, some for hauling, and some for special needs commuting. The commercial jet and the multi-purpose vehicle will one day be remembered like the air balloon and the horse-drawn buggy.

    • (Mid-Summer 08) Local generation of energy will transform the power grids. Look for small, smart wind, solar, and geothermal systems, and passive energy design. Every domicile will be responsible for supplementing centrally distributed power, much like frontiersmen were responsible for their own water. Smarter architecture will contribute over 50% of home and commercial energy reduction within 50 years. Architects are every bit responsible for the energy problems we face, and architects can easily provide new solutions. Private greenspace will command a premium in densely populated areas. In 50 years, water will be a bigger problem than energy.






  • Here it's always nice to see patents from MIT people citing your work 25 years later!
    Most prior art methods that operates [sic] on stochastic shortest paths use adaptive processes ...; few consider minimizing a non-linear function of the length and only give approximate heuristic processes. The most relative [sic] method is that of Loui. Loui considers a general utility function of the path length which is monotone and non-decreasing, and proves that the expected utility becomes separable into the edge lengths only when the utility function is linear or exponential. In that case, the path that maximizes the expected utility can be found via traditional shortest path process. For general utility functions, Loui describes a process based on a certain enumeration of paths. -- Nikolova, Evdokia V. EP20070016374 08/21/2007


  • I've worked a bit on my late thesis advisor's wikipedia page.




  • Former students might also find this SURA/REU page interesting. I had a longer list, but we have to keep things lean or they will delete.




  • Connie Ramos is here letting people order only the hardcover of "Our Friend Barry" these days (though I did see Target and B&N advertising the softcover). Remember, we did this mainly for the campaign and for the historical value, and there were no royalties for authors, no incentives, and no restrictions from the campaign hq.

  • I have been posting to comp.lang.awk lately ... and awk.info has been nice enough to put some of our 15-year old gawk programs from the Undergraduate AI Lab in their awk100 repository. Some of the quotes from that site and others who found "In Praise of Scripting":



    "Listen to people who program, not to people who want to tell you how to program." (http://awk.info/?advocacy)
    Just a small plug for a nice paper by my favorite CS prof Ronald Loui called “In Praise of Scripting”. It’s getting pimped over at Lambda the Ultimate at the moment. He always wanted us to write our AI assignments in Gawk… :) [thanks, Alex! --RPL] (http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/alex_miller/2008/08/_in_praise_of_scripting_.html)
    The author recommends that scripting, not Java, be taught first, asserting that students should learn to love their own possibilities before they learn to loathe other people's restrictions. (http://www.citeulike.org/user/spl/article/3139338 and http://www.citeulike.org/user/ashwinn/article/3139338 and http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2941)
    "But there is emerging consensus in the scripting community that Python is the right choice for freshman programming. Ruby would also be a defensible choice. Python and Ruby have the enviable properties that almost no one dislikes them, and almost everyone respects them. Both languages support a wide variety of programming styles and paradigms and satisfy practitioners and theoreticians equally. Both languages are carefully enough designed that 'correct' programming practices can be demonstrated and high standards of code quality can be enforced. The fact that Google stands by Python is an added motivation for undergraduate majors." (http://www.pythonware.com/daily/2707814520652062882/)
    Professor Ronald Loui has an interesting article on the rise of scripting languages (In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism) in the July 2008 issue of IEEE Computer. It claims scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and Javascript have dramatically fulfilled their early promise, provide many benefits, and are poised to take over the lead from Java. However, the academic programming language community is stuck in theory and hasn't recognized the ascendence of scripting languages. (http://arcfn.com/2008_07_01_archive.html)
    I enjoyed reading In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism by Ronald P. Loui (complete reference below). It’s a high quality text with a lot of perspective. (http://www.soderstrom.se/?p=41)
    Early programmers must learn to be creative and inventive, and they need programming tools that support exploration rather than production. (http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-07.html)
    “To me, Java-based CS1 is the single greatest mistake in the history ofcomputing curricula. Students should learn to love their own possibilitiesbefore they learn to loathe other people’s restrictions.” (http://gride.googlecode.com/files/lmuziol-teaching-summary.pdf)
    As we mentioned earlier, newLISP aims to be a pragmatic, clean and expressive scripting language, though not in the semi-pejorative meaning of 'scripting', but rather as outlined by Ronald Loui in his In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Projects. [sic] (http://www.osnews.com/story/20728/A_Look_at_newLISP/page2/)
    Java-based CS1 is the single greatest mistake in the history of computing curricula. (http://www.csupomona.edu/~bisoroka/website/commonplace.doc)
    We use Python as our programming language in CS1 be- cause it is a syntactically clean, dynamic language that al- lows students to experiment in a live environment with a minimum of syntactic difficulties. For a supporting argu- ment, see [11]. (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~summetj/papers/summet-sigcse09-Personalizing_cs1_with_robots.pdf)
    A recent IEEE Computer article “In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism” recommends “scripting, not Java, be taught first, asserting that students should learn to love their own possibilities before they learn to loathe other people’s restrictions” and concludes with the observation that “an emerging consensus in the scripting community holds that Python is the right solution for freshman programming” [5]. (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1508865.1508907&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES307&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=SIGCSE)






    NOT NEWS

  • Pragmatics Mantra (Part One) for Programmers
    1. Easy is not wrong.
    2. Program by saying simple, normal things.
    3. Cleanliness is all we ask of syntax and semantics.
    4. More programming theory does not make better programmers.
    5. Don't let old/compiler people tell you what language to use.
    6. Maximize independence: strong fences make good components.
    7. You can't use a namespace if everyone else has used it as their sewer.
    8. If there is already a way of doing something, do not invent a harder way.
    9. Listen to people who program, not to people who want to tell you how to program.
    10. Ask not what a programming language can do; ask what a programming language can do for you.
    (see also the Project Management Advice for students in CS436S Software Engineering Workshop ...)




  • Some Obama images: St. Louis campaigner Jen Haro got me close enough in May to remind him he signed my fifth grade yearbook; Some presidential signatures with Obama's mixed in; The New York Times keeps printing our class photo without my permission(!) -- I am in the front row on the left; A letter from Harvard Law School in 1990; Our AI and Law conference home page showing Obama as the banquet speaker (see below).

                                            



    
From BObama@XXXXX.XXXX Sat Nov 11 20:04 CST 2000
Received: from imo-d09.mx.XXXXX.XXXX (imo-d09.mx.XXXXX.XXXX [205.188.157.41])
        by taumsauk.cs.wustl.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA22598
        for ; Sat, 11 Nov 2000 20:04:37 -0600 (CST)
From: BObama@XXXXX.XXXX
Received: from BObama@XXXXX.XXXX
        by imo-d09.mx.XXXXX.XXXX (mail_out_v28.32.) id a.16.4c4cae2 (24899)
         for ; Sat, 11 Nov 2000 21:04:05 -0500 (EST)
Message-ID: <16.4c4cae2.273f5495@XXXXX.XXXX>
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 21:04:05 EST
Subject: Re: 
To: loui@cs.wustl.edu
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 114
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Length: 977
Status: RO

Ron:

Great to hear from you!  My students told me you were in town; had I known, I 
would have made a point of coming to the discussion.

As for the banquet, I'm flattered by the request.  Two concerns.  First, the 
end of May is typically the end of our legislative session, which means that 
I may be tied up in Springfield during the banquet.  I won't know the 
specific schedule for the year for another month probably.  Of course, St. 
Louis is only an hour and a half from Springfield, so if I am in session, but 
the banquet is during down time for us, I'd be happy to come down.

The other concern is whether you really want to hear from a constitutional 
lawyer who is still trying to figure out all these rapid developments in 
technology.

Anyway, once you guys have a date, why don't you contact my assistant, 
Jennifer Mason, at senobama@XXXXX.XXXX, and we'll see what we can work out.

Your work sounds fascinating, and I look forward to hearing more about.

Barry
    (Click here for more of this correspondence.)



    Professor Schauer lecturing in place of Barack Obama in the Old Courthouse where Abraham Lincoln argued for the rights of the rail over the riverboat, and Dred Scott argued his right to be freed from slavery.

    (Actually we wanted Senator Obama in the Old Courthouse first, then shifted him to banquet speaker, suggesting as topic how technology could help democratize access to the law and to government. Emeritus Dean Dorsey Ellis of the Law School was the actual replacement banquet speaker.)

  • 2007 Presidential Campaign Contributions BY Self-Reported Occupation and Employer

  • Wikipedia Punahou School People (Short List) snapshot and current version
  • Wikipedia Punahou School People (Long List) snapshot and current version





  • Recently teaching:

    • CSE100 (Computing Tools, Fall and Spring)
    • CSE104 (Web Development, Fall)
    • CSE513A (Graduate AI Programming Project, Fall)
    • CSE547T (Formal Languages and Automata, Spring)

  • Visitor hosting in 2006:

    Ben Goertzel (3/3)
    David Goldberg (3/4)
    Lotfi Zadeh (4/21)
    		•




    I am still finefacefotos at flickr.com
    (not finefacephotos!)




    Some of Melissa Clark's (MCLARK) stuff on ebay under the seller id collageart1013 (each ORIGINAL under $10):





    more more more more more
    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Welcome back to U.S. Army Reserve Sergeant Jennie Clark from Djibouti & Kuwait & Iraq with her Army Commendation Medal, and to U.S. Army Reserve Sergeant Thomas Clark from Afghanistan with his Bronze Star.


    Jennie is back from Iraq! "Mortar fire hit the camp every day, but the food was good." 




    
A proposed technology article for a journalist friend who was
looking to move up at the WSJ in 1998 (as solicited by his
father, our friend and colleague, Prof. Judea Pearl):


     
loui@csesh /home/ai/loui> ls -l wtext/wsj
-rw-------  1 loui faculty 1710 Apr  9  1998 wtext/wsj
loui@csesh /home/ai/loui> cat wtext/wsj


     
WALL STREET JOURNAL (proposed article)


     
(in-depth interest column)


    
A Vindication of John Maynard Keynes:
Computer Programs that Reason Disputationally


    
by Danny Pearl


    
A computer program for a new form of reasoning
has come to life in the artificial intelligence
laboratory of Washington University in St.
Louis.  It is the second program of its kind:  an
earlier program, called OSCAR, came on-line in
Arizona last year.


    
These programs embody "defeasible" reasoning, or
reasoning based on rules that can be defeated by
other rules, or by opposing lines of argument based
on more rules.


    
While defeasible reasoning does not allow
significantly more intelligent behavior to be
manifest by computers today, it does open the gates
for better computer reasoning about decision,
analogy, policy, and law.


    
The latest program is the work of students in
Professor Ronald Loui's research group:
Guillermo Simari, Adam Costello, and Karl 
Stiefvater.  Its existence represents some 
six years of programming effort.


    
"Actually the philosophy of this approach to
reasoning dates to a dispute John Maynard Keynes
had with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge early in
this century, " says Loui.  "Keynes submitted his
dissertation saying that logic should be based on
argument, on what judges and lawyers do in a
dispute.  This offended Bertrand Russell, who had
been working on logic as a foundation of
mathematics and had already become quite
powerful.  In mathematics, a proof is a proof no
matter what anyone else has to say.  In a
dispute, an argument survives only when there is
no effective counterargument.


    
"Keynes was banished from philosophy and
economists are forever grateful."


    
...


    
(Danny Pearl actually never received this proposed, 
unfinished text)