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PO Box 82
Riverton, IA 51650
Mobile : 712-215-3757
Office : 402-403-1774
Mail : jabowery@gmail.com
Work with David McGoveran on implementing his Ordering Operator Calculus approach to the
Combinatorial Hierarchy thence bitstring physics as developed by him and the late Pierre Noyes at SLAC. This ties into prior work with Tom Etter (see below)
A series of competitions toward rigorous ethics*in AGI founded on Hume's Guillotine: Separating the
question of what IS from what OUGHT to be the case. (https://github.com/jabowery/HumesGuillotine) Rigorous ethics applies intrinsic values in deciding what OUGHT to be done subject to what IS. Sequential Decision Theory is, in this respect, AGI's rigorous ethical reasoning. SDT depends on Algorithmic Information Theory for what IS, and on a given utility function for its intrinsic values.
Failure to recognize this has intellectually crippled the field of AGI ethics.
Developed machine learning applications to optimize Google Ads keyword bids and algorithmic trading.
Provided analysis for :
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
Proposal in response to RFI DN0124 Biomass Conversion and Algae Production at Owens Lake
US Department of Energy
Proposal for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory team's response to DE-FOA-000081, the
Algaoleum, fuel from algae, initiative.
PT Elnusa TBK Collaboration Agreement.
With the Diogenes Institute, a public policy think tank founded by Charles Sinclair Smith, a cofounder of the United States Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency, produced a comprehensive plan for the United States for energy and the environment. Smith, knowing of Bowery's interest in algae cultivation, asked him to identify markets for CO2 that would be profitable enough to re-engineer all US fossil fuel electric generation to zero-emission, at a volume of a billion tonnes CO2 per year. The primary market discovered was the growing global demand for nutrition. Algasol's photobioreactor technology permitted deep penetration of these markets at a cost low enough to pay a price for agricultural grade CO2 high enough to reengineer all fossil fuel electric plants in the US to purify CO2 effluent, ship it to the desert southwest US and even lower the price for electricity to consumers.
Conceived the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge in 2005, based on his early recognition of the, now, widely accepted breakthrough mathematical theory of universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, developed at the Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA, by Marcus Hutter. Hutter, himself, underwrote the prize in 2006. Hutter's first PhD students went on to found DeepMind Technologies in 2010, which was purchased by Google in 2014 for a half billion dollars and is now known as Google DeepMind – the flagship AI project of Alphabet Corporation : Google's holding company. Bowery's colleague at Diogenes Institute, Smith, was credited by the Chronicle of Higher Education's article
« The Believers : The hidden story behind the code that runs our lives » with having provided the earliest investment in deep learning neural networks : the other technological basis for Google DeepMind.
Contributed to the TIBETTM web application framework's multiple inheritance architecture. This refined the earliest (1998) Web 2.0 framework by the same primary authors. Of that framework Brendan Eich, Netscape co-founder and inventor of Javascript said, « I am your humble servant and am in awe of what you've done with Javascript. »
With Roger Everett Gregory, designed a « Simplified high-efficiency propulsion system ». The objective was to permit high-performance automotive machine shops to economically fabricate high- performance rocket engines. A specialist in machine tools, used to build integrated circuit manufacture, was able to fabricate 5 prototype engines. The bursting of the Dot-Com investment bubble in the spring of 2000 removed the financial support required to fully test these engines. Residual funds were invested in acquiring international patent coverage. John Walker provided some early financial support of Gregory during this work.
Based on prior experience with network foundations (see PLATO, Viewdata and HP Web authentication
below) tasked Tom Etter (Dartmouth 1956 AI summer attendee with Solomonoff) with reviving Bertrand Russell’s Relation Arithmetic as empirically-oriented mathematical foundation for formal languages including programming langauges.
Established the first federated web authentication and authorization system. HP required this due to the autonomy of its many divisions, each of which had their own web site with their own customer
relationship management systems. This had been forcing HP customers to remember different login credentials for each HP division with which they did business. The federated system worked so well that it it influenced billion dollar markets via disclosures Bowery made, on behalf of HP, to BEA Systems early in 1998 when HP was considering acquiring that company in hopes HP could buy a solution rather than maintain its own. BEA Systems did not have such a solution but did pick up on its marketability, leading to many implementations. Since, it has become common practice to login to websites with credentials provided by authenticators such as Facebook, Google, etc.
Funded a $1000 prize for the first amateur rocketry group to achieve a 100km altitude. This led a wealthy cell-phone entrepreneur to raise the stakes to $250,000 on Bowery's prize criteria with his
« Cheap Access To Space » (CATS) prize. After the CATS prize endowment was announced, the X- Prize Foundation was able to raise funding for its $10M X-Prize to launch a human to the same height, of 100km. This then became known as the Ansari X-Prize, named after its financier. When Burt Rutan won the $10M, Sir Richard Branson commercialized Rutan's rocket technology to create the first spaceline, Virgin Galactic. This history was presaged by Bowery's leadership in the passage of 1990 Federal law incentivizing private orbital launch services (see below) and, the endorsement of his fusion energy prize legislation (see below).
Building on his successful leadership in passing NASA reforms to privatize orbital launch services, in 1992, drafted legislative language to replace the US fusion energy program with a series of 10, $100M prize awards for the achievement of objective technical milestones along with enabling regulatory reform. A founder of the US fusion energy program (as Assistant Director of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division), Robert W. Bussard sent a copy of Bowery's proposed legislation, endorsing it, to all Congressional leaders with relevant committee authority, as well as to all fusion energy laboratories supported by the Department of Energy, DARPA and NSF.
As part of Science Applications International Corporation's automated toll road collection system, developed the reliable transaction security network providing the high level of accounting integrity demanded by customer contracts.. These contracts required SAIC to pay liquidated damages if any revenues were lost to computer system failures. This highly reliable toll road collection system spun off of SAIC as the multinational TransCore family of companies. It became the world's most widely deployed automated toll road collection system.
As Vice President of Public Affairs at E'Prime Aerospace, commercializing nuclear missiles as launch vehicles, worked with various legal consultants and Congressional contacts, established during the passage of PL101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, for the FCC to issue the first Ka- band satellite license. This license was issued to Norris Satellite Corporation for its proposed NorStar constellation. The motivation for E'Prime's involvement was the potential contract to launch the constellation to geostationary orbit. Although that constellation was not launched due to a failure of Norris Satellite Corporation to raise development capital, Ka-band satellites, similar to NorStar, now offer Internet services to rural areas world-wide.
On July 31, 1991, testified before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space in his role as Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce. This testimony focused on the importance of
commercial incentives for technology development, as exemplified by PL101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990. Bowery's testimony was introduced in a speech by that Act's sponsor, Congressman Ron Packard (CA), who credited The Coalition with introducing the legislation to him and working to find him strategic cosponsors. A result was growing public awareness of the history of aerospace incentives, such as the Kelly Act of 1925, permitting Charles Lindbergh to enter the air mail business, and the Orteig Prize, which Lindbergh then won by flying the Atlantic in 1927. Bowery's 1992 legislative language to replace the US fusion energy program with a series of prizes (see above), added further public awareness in the high tech community to the power of incentives in technology demonstrations resulting in the success of the Ansari X-Prize. The, then, President of the National Space Society, Lori Garver, was impressed by this, as chapters of the NSS had been recruited. When she was nominated by President Obama to be Deputy Administrator of NASA, and confirmed by the Senate, she intervened on behalf of Elon Musk's SpaceX at a critical juncture to ensure that startup was, in accord with PL101-611, given opportunity to compete for NASA launch service contracts. SpaceX then went from the brink of bankruptcy to its current market capitalization of over $30 billion.
As President of Neural Engines Corp. of La Jolla, CA, worked in conjunction with DataCube, Inc., to develop a multisource image segmentation system using DataCube's finite impulse response (FIR) filter hardware to evaluate neural network synapses at a rate of billions of connections per second. This was the highest performance digital neural network system for the time. This system was trainable by presenting it with multispectral images from, for example, LandSat, overlayed with various thematic maps, and rewarding it when it correctly categorized pixels – for example, as cloud cover vs sea ice.
The trained system could then synthesize new thematic maps, segmenting images according to those categories – and do orders of magnitude faster than any other system.
Represented the Transportation Sector of SAIC to its corporate-level software process committee. In this capacity, promoted the adoption of first-order predicate logic notation in formal software specification. This approach permits automatic requirements tracing, computer-assisted test generation and automated proof of correctness of assertions about the specification. Generalization of this approach to software specification, based on Russell's type theory, is now revolutionizing mathematics and software engineering with interactive, computer-aided theorem provers such as Coq.
During the Persian Gulf Crisis, addressed a national defense emergency requiring rapid deployment of a new technology to compensate for a lack of preparedness. A situation arose in which high value US Navy assets, sent to protect oil tankers, were, themselves, so threatened that empty oil tankers were deployed in front of Naval destroyers and aircraft carriers as very expensive mine sweepers. About a dozen people were called in to work on this project with Federal Acquisition Regulation priority equal to « imminent nuclear war ». This project had daily review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff represented by the Jasons. At the time of clearance-debriefing, a project manager told Bowery, paraphrasing, « If I'd know what you were working on, I would have stopped you, so I'm glad I didn't because your idea was critical to the project. »
Developed the user interface to the control software for SAIC's nuclear plant stack monitor system. This applied, to a VT100 ASCII terminal, the context menu innovation of the Xerox Alto Smalltalk computer. The context menu has now become a standard in user interfaces. SAIC's stack monitor set the standard or nuclear plant safety monitoring.
As Manager of Interactive Architectures for a joint venture between AT&T and Knight Ridder Newspapers, Viewdata Corporation of America, Bowery worked with industry leaders such as David P. Reed then of MIT (TCP/IP) and Larry Tesler then of Xerox PARC (thence to work with Steve Jobs on the LISA) to develop the futures architecture for VIEWTRONTM consumer electronic newspaper service. The resulting communications standards proposals were precursors to the World Wide Web.
The architecture included a 64-bit object ID alternative to IP addressing (which is only a 32-bit system ID plus 16-bit service ID,) prior to wide deployment of the latter standard. The 64-bit object ID strategy relied, initially, on a system serial number in the low bits, with object serial numbers in bit-reversed order from the top bits. This assumed Moore's Law would provide sufficient capacity, at a later point in time, to abandon this partitioning of the 64-bit space, thereby permitting cloud-based 10 exa (1019) objects (« Internet of Things ») with advanced Internet routing protocols – obviating both IP address limitations and the « dead links » problem of the WWW. Had it been adopted, levels of function beyond those currently envisioned for IPv6, would have been available at least 3 decades earlier. Even though market tests demonstrated customer enthusiasm, Knight Ridder Newspapers did not want to deploy something like the WWW because its editors wanted to retain control over content.
As a result of his reputation for advanced work at the University of Illinois Urbana PLATO laboratory, Bowery was offered a position with Control Data Corporation. While at CDC he led a team to prototype a mass market version of the PLATO network. The projected market was for
$40(1981)/month per home service included a 512*512 display terminal with touch panel and Z80 processor, telecommunications (cable or phone), supporting 15,000 simultaneous customers on a cluster of CDC supercomputers. Although successful the middle management was unable to understand why mass market computer networking would be a good strategy, and decided against going to market.
As part of the first computer-based conferencing system, authored one of the first electronic mail systems. (PLATO Communications Project; George Carter and Stuart Umpleby, Principal Investigators for the NSF). This conferencing system utilized the Delphi method of forecasting by anonymous consensus originally conceived by General Henry H. Arnold and adopted by RAND Corporation.
Developed the first 3D virtual reality. It was called « Spasim » (Space Simulation). See the Internet Movie Database entry for « Spasim ». It took 25 years for the gaming industry to catch up with online massive multiplayer games. These virtual realities are now competing for leisure time with the motion picture industry. Although there had been 3D graphics system with real time interaction developed by Evans and Sutherland for flight simulation, they did not permit multiple humans to interact in the virtual world let alone do so remotely. In any event, they were too expensive for even airlines to use in training. Spasim introduced the generation that built Silicon Valley and video gaming to virtual reality through their early access to the PLATO network on college campuses. Early spin-offs were Microsoft's FlightSimulatorTM, Atari Battlezone the the first person shooter industry starting with Id Software's DOOM.