J.D. was the first Ph.D. student to graduate from the Automated Reasoning Group at UCLA. He made substantial contributions to SamIam as he architected the core inference engine, and served as a mentor for subsequent graduate students as the team collaborated in the development of the tool. J.D. also contributed the MAP component of SamIam, which implements his Ph.D. research on the subject. J.D.'s contributions to MAP — in the areas of exact inference, approximate inference, and computational complexity — revived work on this subject, and set new foundations for a growing body of research on MAP in the field of AI.

The Automated Reasoning Group at UCLA dedicates SamIam to the fine memory of J.D. Park who passed away unexpectedly in January of 2012.