https://chrisman.org/Lonnie   
 

Biography

Lonnie Chrisman received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence / Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. He is the Chief Technical Officer for Lumina Decision Systems, where he heads development of the AnalyticaŽ visual modeling software product. Dr. Chrisman has authored many refereed publications in the areas of machine learning, Artificial Intelligence planning, robotics, probabilistic inference, Bayesian networks, and computational biology.

Vitals

  • Born 1965 [parentage]. Grew up in Silicon Valley, California.
  • Married (wife:Debbie) with four adult daughters: Brianna, Whitney, Ashley, and Lauren.
  • Lives in San Jose, California (near Los Gatos).

    • Employment

  • 2003-present: Chief Technical Officer, Lumina Decision Systems
  • 2002-2003: Computational Biologist, Computational Learning Lab at CSLI at Stanford University, a Research Scientist in Computational Biology at the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise. Research on Causal Discovery.
  • 1999-2002: Software Development Manager: Ask Jeeves Corporate solutions. Lead architect and engineering manager for Answers from Databases and Jeeves Advisor products.
  • 1996-1999: Director of Engineering: Lumina Decision Systems

    • Education

  • Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 1996.
    Advisors: Reid Simmons and Tom Mitchell
  • M.S. in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 1991
  • Graduate Studies, Machine Learning, School of Computer Science, U.C. Berkeley, 1987-8.
    Advisor: Stuart Russell
  • B.S, Electrical Engineering, U.C. Berkeley, 1987.
  • A.S. Mathematics and A.S. Physics, Foothill College, Los Altos, California, 1985.
  • High School, Awalt / Mt. View High School, class of 1983.

    • Trivia

  • First programming language mastered: HPL on an HP9835 in mid 1970s.
  • Built a home computer, 1977, seventh grade.
  • First professional programming job: 1979, eighth grade
  • Perfect 4.0 through all college courses.
  • President of Mu Chapter, Eta Kappa Nu, at U.C. Berkeley, 1987.
  • Awarded the Alton B. Zerby award "Most outstanding Electrical Engineering Student in the USA", 1987.
  • Credited on Wikipedia as the second person ever to attempt neural machine translation, from his paper published in the Journal of Connection Science in 1991. The transformer architecture that powers most large language models (LLMs) today was introduced originally for neural machine translation.
  • His AAAI-1991 publication is believed to be the first published paper in the Artificial Intelligence literature to use a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model. (Sven Koenig's Masters thesis as U.C. Berkeley, though not published, did use a POMDP prior to this). Several years later, POMDPs were used extensively in AI.
  • He was announcer and emcee for the first two annual AAAI mobile robotic competitions. (And CMU team member for the first three).
  • At the height of Ask Jeeves' Corporate Solutions succeess, Jeeves Solutions had three product offerings. Lonnie was lead designer, architect, and engineering project manager for two of the three (Answers from Databases and Jeeves Advisor).
  • Taught graduate course on Causal Models in Biomedical Informatics (BMI 240) in the school of Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University, Winter session 2003, along with Pat Langley.