Who I am

Hi! I'm Lonnie Chrisman of San Jose, California.

I have four adult daughters, all with blooming and successful careers, and all on their own now. My wife Debbie is an active and well-liked fitness instructor at many gyms, well-known Silicon valley companies and senior independent living communities.

I have a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. At CMU, I worked on robotics projects, focused on machine learning and planning under uncertainty. My advisers were Reid Simmons and Tom Mitchell. I also spent a year prior to CMU doing machine learning research at Berkeley with Stuart Russell. At CMU, I participated on the Mars Rover and Lunar Rover robotics projects, and on the Machine Learning Lab's indoor robotics projects. I have published papers in the areas of PAC machine learning theory, robotics, neural networks, reinforcement, probabilistic planning, Bayesian networks algorithms, probabilistic inference, computational biology, and genealogy.

For a few decades, I was active at genealogy (as a hobby), with emphasis on utilizing computer and internet resources in support of the endeavor. My own genealogy web pages (now at Chrisman.org) were among the first web pages as the world wide web got started, and certainly one of the earliest genealogy web sites to appear on the WWW. My activity level in this hobby has dwindled substantially in recent years due to other commitments and interests.

I am the Chief Technology Officer for Lumina Decision Systems. In this capacity, I manage and participate in the software development of programs that enable people to build and share quantitative models. Our flagship product, Analytica is used by people to build quantiative models in very diverse areas that include energy policy, environmental impact, wildlife management, competitive analysis, evaluation of new business ventures, food risk safety, power plant maintanence, financial forecasting and strategic planning, water resource management, R&D portfolio management, climate change modeling, systems monitoring and anomaly detection, defense planning and logistics, and quite a few others. One of the many things I like a lot about this job is that I often get an opportunity to help people with their modeling in these diverse areas, often (through Quick Starts) for a few hours at a time. There have been times where within the span of a couple weeks, I've been able to help very smart people with their models of water contamination modeling one day, an electrical transmission model the next, then pharma research, hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear power plant, commodity trading, and disease epidemic modeling in wildlife populations. It is the type of thing I find fun.

Users of Analytica tend to be very passionate about the product, which is very rewarding for me, since I'm often getting a lot of positive feedback from them. Since the majority of my time is spent on the development of this product, I really appreciate all that feedback. For those of you who have sent that encouragement, thank you!

I have written a few articles thus far for Wikipedia, including articles on Analytica, Expected value of including uncertainty (EVIU), and the Expected value of sample information (EVSI). I make it a practice to fix mistakes and add clarifications to articles in Wikipedia as I encounter them, and have done so to dozens of existing articles. I find Wikipedia to be a fantastic technical resource and I make much use of it.

I have a clear "conflict of interest" with respect to Analytica, given that it is my baby, so to speak. (I didn't originate the product, but I have been its development lead for many years). Those who know me of course know that I am first and foremost an engineer and scientist, and it is my interest to provide readers of Wikipedia with the high quality and most useful information, whether or not it intersects this "conflict of interest", but at least I am entirely open about the potential perception of a conflict of interest. Also, of course, I tend to make contributions in the areas that I am working in, and in my own areas of expertise, while at the same time I tend to focus my employment within my own areas of expertise, and hence, intersections are inevitable. For example, readers will find Analytica is often my programming language of choice when providing examples of decision analytic modeling, although it is not my only choice in this regard. I do this because it often is the best choice, since it is designed specifically for providing open-source models, with an emphasis on clarity, transparency and understandability, and due to its original design as a tool for teaching decision analytic concepts in college-level classes. This has enabled me to include several fully runable, complete, transparent open source examples along with articles that I have contributed -- something that is unusual among Wikipedia articles (perhaps not entirely unique to my own), but also something that I hope adds tremendous value to students of these topics. If you see one of my articles that uses Analytica as an example, and you want to add that some other tool or framework that I haven't mentioned is also used in that space, please do so. I am 100% in favor of such coverage, you won't annoy me (assuming it is legitimate and noteworthy for the topic). This is the whole benefit of community contribution to such articles.