Tim Finin is a Research Scientist at the JHU’s Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has over 35 years of experience in applications of artificial intelligence to problems in information systems and language understanding. His current research is focused on the Semantic Web, mobile computing, analyzing and extracting information from text and online social media, and on enhancing security and privacy in information systems. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), an IEEE technical achievement award recipient and was selected as the UMBC Presidential Research Professor in 2012.

Finin received an S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held full-time positions at UMBC, Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory. He is the author of over 350 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. He participated in the DARPA/NSF Knowledge Sharing Effort, helped lead the development of the KQML agent communication language and was a member of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group that standardized the semantic web language OWL.

Finin has chaired of the UMBC Computer Science Department, served on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, been a AAAI councilor, and chaired a number of major research conferences. He is currently an editor-in-chief of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics and a co-editor of the Viewpoints section of the Communications of the ACM.