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Cary deBessonet

Cary deBessonet has worked in the field of Artificial Intelligence for over two decades in the areas of knowledge representation, automated reasoning, knowledge acquisition, and the simulation of human dialog. He received the J.D. degree from Louisiana State University and the LL.M. degree from the University of Illinois. He holds the title of Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center. In preparation for work towards the LL.M. degree, Professor deBessonet completed the course work for the M.A. degree in philosophy while serving as the graduate assistant to the logician, Jason Xenakis. This background in logic and philosophy attracted him to the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Professor deBessonet has authored numerous articles in AI and law. Included in his publications in the field of AI is a book on a many-valued approach to deduction and reasoning that has been published in the Computer Science and Engineering series of Kluwer Academic Publishers. He is the developer of the knowledge representation language SL (Symbolic Language) and its accompanying interpreter/inference engine SMS (Symbolic Manipulation System), which together support the construction and querying of knowledge bases and .intelligent documents.. He has been the principal investigator on a number of grants, including awards in AI from LEQSF, NSF, DOE and NASA, and has served as the director of the AI Project of the Louisiana State Law Institute. He also served as the Reporter for the Coordinating Committee of that institute doing work on the revision of the Civil Code of Louisiana.

The latest work of Professor deBessonet is a book entitled, The Civil Code and Artificial Intelligence, a forthcoming publication of the Center of Civil Law Studies of the LSU Law Center. In it he describes how the technology he has developed can be employed in the legal domain to build a virtual or concept-based code that is capable of conducting conceptual retrieval operations over provisions of the Civil Code of Louisiana.

You can find out more about Cary at His page at the Southern University Law Center and the University of Trier's Bibliography Server