Dr Lowry serves as NASA’s Chief Scientist for Reliable Software Engineering. He became interested in Neuromorphic computing as a means of radically improving compute power and energy efficiency for NASA’s embedded aerospace missions. In 2019 he was awarded project funding by the Science Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Game Changing Technology division to work in the area of radiation-tolerant Neuromorphic Computing – to close the gap between terrestrial Neuromorphic Computing capabilities and embedded space computing.

Lowry has been principle investigator on advanced software engineering technologies through NASA Aeronautics and Space R&D programs since 1996. The major theme of his research has been the automation of mathematically based methods for software engineering including generation and verification of NASA aerospace software systems. During Project Constellation he led the definition of the Lunar Surface Systems Software Architecture. He led human space research for development of advanced software verification tools, including from 2006 through 2012 the maturation of the software development tool chain on Project Orion, NASA’s multi-purpose crew vehicle.  Dr Lowry managed the NASA Ames software analysis of the Toyota unintended acceleration at the request of the National Transportation Safety Board in 2010. From 2012 through 2014 he served as Chief Scientist for DARPA’s META project, which emphasized automated design tools and formal verification for cyber-physical systems such as next-generation ground vehicles.

Dr Lowry was awarded a NASA Aeronautics project in 2016 to determine the feasibility of an Autonomous Operating System (AOS) for UAVs. AOS integrates Artificial Intelligence reasoning engines with a widely used NASA middleware platform called Core Flight System – to provide an infrastructure for smart UAVs. Lowry and his team prototyped putting the training and procedural knowledge of an airplane pilot into AOS towards ‘Pilot in a Box’.

Dr Lowry received his MS/BS from MIT and his PhD in 1989 from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence. Dr Lowry is an IEEE Automated Software Engineering Fellow, with numerous publications. He serves on the following journal editorial boards: Springer Journal of Automated Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, and Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering Journal.

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