Tim Finin (http://umbc.edu/~finin/) is a Professor in the
Department 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,
intelligent interfaces and robotics and is currently working
on social media, the semantic web, intelligent agents and
mobile computing.  He holds degrees from MIT and the
University of Illinois and has also held positions at
Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI
Laboratory.

Finin is the author of over 270 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.