John Lowe is a data scientist advising the Middle Mekong Archaeology Project (MMAP) on data collection and management issues.

After completing his BA in linguistics at Yale in 1977 in Sanskrit and Indo-European historical linguistics, Dr. Lowe worked for the University of California Division of Library Automation on the design and development of several information retrieval systems, including the MELVYL online catalog (the first public access online library catalog in the world). He received his Master’s degree from the School of Library and Information Science (now the School of Information, or iSchool) in 1987.

Returning to linguistics, Dr. Lowe received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1995. At UC Berkeley, he initiated several projects to study and preserves the lexicons of the world’s languages, including the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project, the Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary, and the Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon, among others.  He was technical director of the first version of FrameNet, a semantic lexicon of English being built at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. He has been a long-term collaborator on language archiving and linguistic annotation as a researcher and membre associé at various CNRS laboratories in Paris.