John James, Ph.D.

Dr. John James is an associate professor with the Robotics Research Center at the United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York.

He commanded three times at the company level - twice with air defense artillery units in Germany and once as a district senior advisor in Vietnam. His last active-duty assignment was as director of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Artificial Intelligence Center, where he led development of more than 30 small knowledge-based decision support systems, at least two of which were used for more than 25 years. 

As a contractor with research engineers from Lockheed Advanced Technology Laboratories, Dr, James investigated the implementation of netted, distributed control of theater-level air defense fires for the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS).

He has been teaching as a USMA civilian faculty member since 2000. He deployed twice for short periods to Afghanistan to work with the computer science department of the National Military Academy of Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. Dr. James has taught computer science, electrical engineering, information technology, and cyber classes.

His research interests include computable models of command intent that affect the evolution of system logical behaviors over time and resilient distributed control. This includes interfacing logical constraints of system safety and security components, which affect logical system evolution, with physical constraints of continuous system components, which affect physical system evolution.