Lonnie Dale Chrisman , Ph.D.

BIOGRAPHY: Lonnie grew up in the "Silicon Valley" in the 1970s where he took up an early childhood interest in electronics and mircocomputers. He learned to program computers at age eight, with his father built his first home microcomputer in 1977 and began programming professionally at age 14. During high school he took up an interest in guitar and played in numerous rock and jazz groups. He graduated from Awalt-Mountain View high school (Mt. View, Califormia) in 1983, earned Associate degrees in Mathematics and Physics from Foothill College in 1985, and completed a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1987 from U.C. Berkeley. He was presented the Alton B. Zerby "Most Outstanding Electrical Engineering Student in the United States of America" award in 1987 by Eta Kappa Nu, the national Electrical Engineering honors society. Lonnie completed his masters degree (1991) and Ph.D. degrees (1996) in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where contributed and published numerous technical papers in the areas of Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence Planning, Robotics, Reasoning about Uncertainty, and Probabilistic Inference. He returned with his growing family to the Silicon Valley in Sept. 1996 and joined Lumina Decision Systems, Inc., a small company specializing in Decision Analysis consulting and software, where he became Director of Software Engineering and pioneered the advancement of the company's flagship product, Analytica. While there he also served as chief software architect for all R&D, including the development of "the Advisor", a technology which was subsequently acquired by Ask Jeeves, Inc. With the acquisition, Lonnie worked at Ask Jeeves until May 2002, when he left to pursue the burgeoning area of Bioinformatics. From Feb 2002 through June 2003,, Lonnie was a member of the Computational Learning Lab at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, work with a non-profit organization called the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE) as a research scientist in Computational Biology. Also since Nov 2003, he has been acting as Chief Technical Officer of Lumina Decision Systems. He is very highly involved with his four daughters, with whom and for whom he spends every spare moment.