Tim Finin
Timothy Wilking Finin is an Emeritus Research Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department and director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research has focused on the applications of artificial intelligence to problems in information systems and has included contributions to natural language processing, expert systems, the theory and applications of multiagent systems, the semantic web, and mobile computing.
Education
Finin earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1971 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1980.Career
Prior to joining the UMBC in 1991 as chair of its Computer Science Department, he held positions at the Unisys Paoli Research Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 2007 to 2025 he was an affiliate faculty member at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of more than 500 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. He has mentored 31 doctoral students who have received their Ph.D. degrees from UMBC or the University of Pennsylvania.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, ACM Autonomous Agents conference, ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing, International Semantic Web Conference and IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics. He served as an editor in chief of the Journal of Web Semantics from 2005 to 2016, as the co-editor of the Viewpoints section of Communications of the ACM from 2013 to 2022, and is currently on the editorial board of several other journals. Finin is a former AAAI councilor and former board member of the Computing Research Association.