I am a Professor in the Department
of Computer Science and Director of the Institute
for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland. I received the NSF National Young Investigator Award in 1993 and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Science Center/Maryland Academy of Science in
1997. My primary area of research is in databases and artificial intelligence. My work in AI spans rule-based expert systems and logic programs, nonmonotonic reasoning,
probabilistic reasoning, temporal reasoning, hybrid reasoning, and software agents. My work in databases focuses on heterogeneous database integration and interoperability,
logic databases, probabilistic databases, and multimedia databases. In the last few years, I have been studying how to reason about massive collections of multilingual
document collections and mine them for sentiment/opinion information as well as how to mine ontologies directly from text. I have been applying my work to the study of
foreign cultures and terrorist groups with a view to automatically extracting data about a group’s organization and activities and mining this information in order to build
stochastic behavioral models of the group. See my September 14, 2007 paper in
Science magazine
on real time cultural reasoning. My group and I have built several scalable systems for these and other purposes which have been applied extensively in
government and industrial applications
Current or Past Journal Editorial Activities:
- IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
- Journal of Parallel and Distributed Databases
- Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
- Journal of Logic Programming
- Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
- Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal
- Fundamenta Informaticae
- Artifical Intelligence Communications
Recent Awards/Honors:
- OASYS Opinion Analysis System wins
2006 ComputerWorld Magazine Horizon Awards for most
innovative pre-commercial software of 2006.
- Selected for inclusion on ISIHighlycited.com, a web site run by Thompson Scientific which lists the 320 most
widely sited computer scientists of all time.
- Listed as one of the top 50 most nuturing computer scientists since 1992 based on citations (#16) and publication count (#35) according to a study by the Indian Institute of Science.
- Work on reasoning about cultures highlighted in an
article in Science Magazine, Vol.316, pp. 534-535, April 27, 2007.
Current or Past Committee Memberships:
- Program Chair, Scalable Uncertainty Modeling (SUM) 2007 Conference with H. Prade.
- Program Chair, ODBASE 2006 with M. Lenzerini and E. Neuhold.
- Executive Advisory Council, DARPA Advanced Logistics Program
(ALP)
- Ad-hoc Member, US Air Force Science Advisory Board
- Member, Board of Directors, Development Gateway Foundation
Recent Invited Talks at Conferences:
-
Invited talk, Fourth Conference on Mathematical Methods in
Counter-terrorism, Rochester, NY, September 20-22, 2007.
-
Invited talk, International Conference on Computational Cultural
Dynamics, August 2007.
- Presented a talk
on "Computational Cultural Dynamics" on Capitol Hill, June 14,
2007. The talk was attended by US Representatives Adam Smith
(D-WA), Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Jim Sexton (R-NJ), as well as
several congressional staff members and others.
- Keynote Lecture, 2005 International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Systems (ODBASE 2005), Oct/Nov 2005, Agia Napa, Cyprus
Recent Media Citations:
- The Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics’ SOMA Terror Organization
Portal (STOP) and social network site for terrorism related analysis and
prediction was featured in several major news media (Feb. 26). STOP provides
methods for reasoning about terror groups and forecasting what they might do
in the future. In addition, it contains unique social networking
capabilities that allow analysts to effectively cooperate in order to better
understand and counteract terror groups. Citations include
ComputerWorld,
UPI News Track Top News,
Public Radio and
NetworkWorld.
- Work on
computational cultural dynamics extensively discussed in an op-ed piece in
the
Manila Sunday Times, Jan. 13, 2008.
- Featured
in the Swiss Public Radio program under “Computerspiel-Designer” (Dec. 8,
2007). This program focused on my work on computational cultural models and
its relationship to games.
- Article
in the New York Sun on Nov. 14, 2007 on terrorism and gaming.
- An article on my work on computational cultural reasoning appeared on the home page of
AAAS June 25, 2007.
- An article on OASYS appeared in
Sci.cam, Italy, May 2007.
- Science Magazine coverage, April 27, 2007
article.
- RAI-TV (Italy) coverage of OASYS on November 6, 2006
- Work on OASYS covered by Panorama magazine, September 21, 2006.
- Work on OASYS covered by ComputerWorld on August 21, 2006.
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