William Lawless, Ph.D.

Professor
Paine College

Profile

W.F. Lawless retired in 1981 from the USMC-R, Lt.Col, aviator. In 1977, he became a mechanical engineer with Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River Site, SC, in charge of nuclear waste management, when he blew the whistle on DOE’s mismanagement of its radioactive wastes. After his PhD, 1992, DOE invited him to join its board at DOE-SRS, where he coauthored numerous recommendations on environmental remediation to treat DOE’s radioactive wastes (e.g., the regulated closure in 1997 of the first two high-level radioactive waste tanks). His research today is on autonomous human-machine teams. With the Naval Research Lab, DC, he has co-edited 13 books on AI (Springer 2016; 2017; CRC 2018; Elsevier 2019; 2020 [Elsevier nominated the latter, "Human-Machine Shared Contexts," to ASIS&T for its Information Science book of the year award for 2020]; Springer, 2021; Springer LNCS, 2021; Frontiers in Physics, 2023; Elsevier, 2024; 2024; 2025; 2026 proposed; Entropy 2025). He co-organized a special issue on “human-machine teams and explainable AI” for AI Magazine (2019; 1st editorial). He authored/co-authored 300+ peer-reviewed publications (e.g., https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202307.0607/v1). He co-organized thirteen AAAI symposia at Stanford (2025: Current and Future Varieties of Human-AI Collaboration). For Frontiers in Physics, he co-organized: "Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Structure and Performance of Interdependent Autonomous Human Machine Teams and Systems” (2nd editorial). He co-organized AHFE’s 2023 SIG: Data dependency. He co-organized Entropy's Special Issue, 2025: "An Entropy Approach to the Structure and Performance of Interdependent Autonomous Human Machine Teams and Systems” (3rd editorial); he has 9 award nominations, the top article in AHFE 2024, a distinguished faculty research position at the Naval Research Lab, DC, summer 2025, and has been nominated by AHFE 2025 for its Distinguished Researcher Award.

Sessions

Back to the Search