Dr. Timothy W.  Finin is a Professor in the Department of Computer
Science and Electrical Engineering of the University of Maryland
Baltimore County.  He has had over 25 years of experience in the
applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in database and
knowledge base systems, intelligent information systems, expert
systems, natural language processing, intelligent interfaces and
robotics.  He is currently working on the development of technology to
support intelligent information agents.

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
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.
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 eighty research publications in journals,
books and refereed conference proceedings.  He has received grants and
research contracts from a variety of sources including NSF, ARPA,
AFOSR, ARO, NASA, NIST, NSA, IBM, HP, TI, and DEC.  He has been the
past program chair and general chair of the IEEE Conference on
Artificial Intelligence for Applications and the general chair of the
first two International Conferences on Information and Knowledge
Management.  He is on the editorial board of the International Journal
of Information and Knowledge Management, User Modeling and User
Adaptive Behavior, and Artificial Intelligence Review.