Summary
Tim Finin is a veteran AI researcher and Research Professor at UMBC who has spent more than five decades applying AI to language understanding, knowledge representation, and secure information systems. As Director of the UMBC Center for Artificial Intelligence and former Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair in Engineering, he blends deep academic leadership with sustained hands-on research in knowledge graphs and text analytics. An ACM and AAAI Fellow and IEEE Technical Achievement Award recipient, he has shaped the field via roles ranging from editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics to chairing major conferences and serving on the CRA board. His career bridges industry and academia—spanning MIT’s AI Lab, Unisys, Johns Hopkins HLTCOE, and long-standing faculty service at UMBC—giving him a rare perspective on deploying research into real systems. Notably, he continues to advance privacy and security in information systems while mentoring interdisciplinary teams that translate symbolic AI ideas into modern knowledge-graph applications.
12 years of coding experience
30 years of employment as a software developer
S.B. Electrical Engineering, S.B. Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D. Computer Science, Ph.D. Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Dutch