UMBC's mission is to focus on science, technology, engineering and public policy. The suburban campus of 10,400 students is located in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, providing easy access to both metropolitan areas and the numerous federal agencies, industrial research centers, and consulting firms. A new on-campus technology center houses a number of technology start-up firms. UMBC's funding of grants, awards and sponsored research exceeds $36M per year.

LAIT's Research facilities are excellent. The laboratory is housed in a new building devoted to engineering and computer science. An extensive research computing facility includes a large network of UNIX workstations (SGI, Sun, and IBM), large computer servers (SGI, Sun), and PC workstations (Intel and Mac). Access to Super-computing facilities is through the University of Maryland Institute of Advanced Computer Science (SP-2 and CM-5) and the San Diego Supercomputing Center Consortium. UMBC's University computing systems for instructional and research use consists of UNIX and VMS systems and include two 20-processor SGI Challenge-XL systems, numerous SGI Crimsons, seventy-three Indigo graphic workstations, a new VAX 4000/500, a Cray YMP-EL and many PC and Mac workstations. Some related laboratories include the Computer Graphics, Animation, and Visualization Lab; the Security Technology Research Group; the Maryland Center For Telecommunications Research (MCTR); the Parallel Processing Lab; and the Remote Sensing, Signal, and Image Processing Lab;

LAIT's research scope covers virtually all aspects of building intelligent information systems. Our research is funded by external grants and contracts from industry and government agencies, including DARPA, NSF, NSA, AFOSR, and NASA. Recent papers and project descriptions are available on-line from the LAIT web page at http://www.cs.umbc.edu/lait/. We also provide a number of services to the research community such as AgentWeb, the AgentNews newsletter, and the software agents mailing list. Some recent and ongoing projects include

• CIIMPLEX (software agents for manufacturing information systems)
• Intelligent Agent Integration Technology
• Intelligent Agent Protocols
• Cycic Friends Network (distributed reasoning)
• TellTale ( high-performance information retrieval)
• Carrot (distributed information retrieval)
• Visualization of document similarity
• Neural Network Methods for Belief Networks
• High Capacity Neural Network Associative Memories
• Computational Model of Artificial Life
• Persistent Storage Technology for Planning and Scheduling
• EVOLVER (evolutionary design of software systems)
• Automatic Memoization as a Software Engineering Tool
• A security architecture for agent communication languages

Graduate research and study can be pursued by enrolling in the MS or PhD degree programs in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Information Systems. For applications of more information contact

Vice President for Graduate Studies and Research
University of Maryland Graduate School, Baltimore
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250 USA
Voice: 410-455-2537, Fax: 410-455-1092
umbcGrad@umbc.edu
http://www.umbc.edu/homepage/admissions/graduate/

For more information, contact

Laboratory of Advanced Information Technology
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250 USA
Voice: 410-455-3971, Fax: 410-455-3969
lait-info@cs.umbc.edu
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/lait

Gerald Canfield, Associate Professor of Information Systems, Ph.D. in Medical Informatics, University of Utah. Healthcare Informatics, clinical information systems, database modeling, computer-supported collaborative work, decision support systems, and network architecture. computational lexicography, discourse analysis, and textbase environments.

David Ebert, Assistant Professor; PhD, Ohio State. Realistic interactive volumetric visualization; procedural modeling; modeling gases, water, and fire; advanced rendering and animation techniques; and volumetric rendering.

Henry H. Emurian, Associate Professor of Information Systems. Ph.D. in Psychology, The American University. User Interfaces, intelligent agents, human factors.

Tim Finin, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge and database systems, natural language processing, intelligent agents.

Timothy Foresman , Assistant Professor of Geography, Ph.D. in Geography, University of California at Santa Barbara. Geographic Information Systems.

Kostas Kalpakis, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Maryland. Digital libraries, electronic commerce, databases, multimedia, parallel and distributed computing, and combinatorial optimization.

Yannis Labrou, Post-doctoral fellow, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, University of Maryland Baltimore County. Agent communication languages and architectures, knowledge representation and reasoning, and artificial intelligence.

James Mayfield, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Berkeley. Agent-based architectures, natural language processing, information extraction, and hypertext.

Ethan Miller, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Berkeley. Mass storage systems, parallel file systems, information retrieval, parallel computing, and computer systems.

Charles Nicholas, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Ohio State. Electronic document processing, software engineering, and intelligent information systems.

Anthony F. Norcio , Professor of Information Systems; Ph.D. in Psychology, Catholic University. Intelligent human-computer interfaces, software design, user modeling, adaptive interfaces.

Yun Peng, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Maryland College Park. Artificial intelligence, neural network computing, and medical applications.

Aya Soffer , Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Ph.D. in COmputer Science, Maryland College Park. Research interests include: pictorial information systems, document analysis and recognition, digital libraries, geographic information systems and non-traditional database systems.

Ramesh Venkataraman , Assistant Professor of Information Systems. Ph.D. in Management Information Systems, University of Arizona. Dr. Venkataraman's primary research interests are in the areas of heterogeneous databases, database modeling, software engineering, and the use of group support systems in education.

Yelena Yesha, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; PhD, Ohio State. Distributed systems, database systems, digital libraries, electronic commerce, performance modeling, design tools for optimizing availability in replicated database systems, efficient and highly fault tolerant mutual exclusion algorithms, and analytical performance models for distributed and parallel systems.

Affiliates

Donald P. McKay, Industrial Associate, Lockheed-Martin, Indiana University, SUNY-Buffalo. Knowledge representation and reasoning, artificial intelligence, database management systems, software engineering, application of advanced information technology to education.