Timothy Wilking Finin (born 1949 in

Walworth Walworth () is a district of south London, England, within the London Borough of Southwark. It adjoins Camberwell to the south and Elephant and Castle to the north, and is south-east of Charing Cross. Major streets in Walworth include the Old ...

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

) is the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair in Engineering and is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

at the

University of Maryland, Baltimore County The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university in Baltimore County, Maryland. It has a fall 2022 enrollment of 13,991 students, 61 undergraduate majors, over 92 graduate programs (38 master, 25 doctoral, ...

(UMBC). His research has focused on the applications of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

to problems in information systems and has included contributions to

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

expert systems In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if� ...

, the theory and applications of

multiagent systems A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Jang, I.; Arvin, F.; Lanzon, A.,A Decentralized Cluster Formation Containment Framework fo ...

, the semantic web, and

mobile computing Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...

Education

Finin earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

in 1971 and a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in Computer Science from the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

in 1980.

Career

Prior to joining the UMBC, he held positions at the

Unisys Unisys Corporation is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. It provides digital workplace solutions, cloud, applications, and infrastructure solutions, e ...

Paoli Research Center, the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, and the

MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

. Since 2007 he has been an affiliate faculty member at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

. He is the author of more than 450 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. He has been an organizer of several major conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications, ACM

Conference on Information and Knowledge Management The ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM, pronounced ) is an annual computer science research conference dedicated to information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM). Since the first event in 1992, the conference ...

, ACM Autonomous Agents conference, ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing,

International Semantic Web Conference The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is a series of academic conferences and the premier international forum for the Semantic Web, Linked Data and Knowledge Graph Community. Here, scientists, industry specialists, and practitioners ...

and IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics. He served as an editor in chief of the

Journal of Web Semantics The ''Journal of Web Semantics'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier. It covers knowledge technologies, ontology, software agents, databases and the semantic grid, information retrieval, human language technology, ...

from 2005 to 2016, is currently a co-editor of the Viewpoints section of

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are intended for readers with ...

and is on the editorial board of several other journals. Finin is a former

AAAI The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

councilor and board member of the

Computing Research Association The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit association of North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia enga ...

Awards

In 1997 he was selected as a fellow of the

Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is a body for developing and setting computer software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. FIPA was founded as a Swiss not-for-profit organization i ...

for his work on agent communication languages. The

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

gave him a Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering contributions to distributed intelligent systems" in 2009. In 2012 he was selected as UMBC's Presidential Research Professor for the three-year term 2012–2015. In 2013 he was named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for "significant contributions to the theory and practice of knowledge sharing in multiagent systems and on the Web, and for sustained service to the AI community". In 2018, the Association for Computing Machinery named him an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

for his contributions to the theory and practice of knowledge sharing in distributed systems and the World Wide Web.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Finin, Tim 1949 births Living people Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Artificial intelligence researchers American computer scientists MIT School of Engineering alumni Grainger College of Engineering alumni People from Walworth, Wisconsin University of Maryland, Baltimore County faculty Semantic Web people Natural language processing researchers