Long Biosketch
Tim Finin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has over 30 years of experience in the applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in information systems and is currently working on the theory and applications of intelligent software agents, the semantic web, and mobile computing.
Finin received the SB degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. From 1971 to 1974 he was a member of the research staff at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he did research in computer vision and robotics. He received MSc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977 and 1980, respectively. During this time he was a member of the research team that developed the PLANES system - an early natural language interface to a database management system.
In 1977, Finin was a visiting research associate in at the I.B.M. Research Laboratory (San Jose) where he participated in the implementation of Rendezvous, a natural language interface to database systems. From 1980 to 1987, Finin was on the faculty of the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked on computational linguistics and expert systems. From 1987 to 1991 Finin served as a technical director at the Unisys Center for Advanced Information Technology. During this time he managed a group which conducted research in knowledge based systems, natural language processing and speech recognition. He joined the UMBC Computer Science Department in 1991 and served as its chair until 1994.
Finin is the author of over 375 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. In the early 1990s he was a member of the DARPA/NSF Knowledge Representation Standards Effort and helped lead the development of the KQML agent communication language. Ten years later he served as a member of the W3C Web Ontology working group which produced the OWL language for the Semantic Web.
He has been an organizer of several major conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications, The ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, ACM Autonomous Agents conference, the ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing and the AI and the Web track at AAAI-06 and -07.
Finin was the chair of the UMBC Computer science Department from 1991 to 1995. He is currently on the editorial board of several journals and is an editor in chief of the Journal of Web Semantics. He is a former AAAI councilor and member board of directors of the Computing Research Association.