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 (so the character in the memoir is a composite of two people).

Loui was a leading innovator in logic-based artificial intelligence and a leading advocate of defeasible reasoning and 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. 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 (for legal opinions) in the early 1990s.

A graduate of Harvard with a senior thesis that shared the ACM national prize for best undergraduate paper in computing, he earned his Ph.D. under Henry E. Kyburg, and spent postdoctoral time at Stanford under Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky.

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