I am a
Professor in the Department of Computer
Science and Director of the Institute
for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) 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 which, in turn, can be used to come up with
forecasts of future behavior of the group. See my September 14, 2007 paper
in Science magazine on real time cultural reasoning. Articles on my
work in this area (with my students and colleagues) also appeared in the New
Scientist (March 15, 2008) and the Washington
Post (Feb 16, 2009). 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
- Artificial Intelligence Communications
Recent Awards/Honors:
- Elected a Fellow of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in late 2008.
-
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:
- Keynote address, Proc.
2008 First Intl. Workshop on Social Computing,Behavioral Modeling and Prediction, Phoenix,
April 1-2, 2008.
- 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
Kojo Nnamdi show
on WAMU 90.9 Public Radio (Washington DC) show focusing on Artificial
Intelligence, Nov. 25, 2008.
- The SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) and
social network site for terrorism related analysis and prediction
developed by my group 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
Washington
Post (Feb
16, 2009), Canada AM on Canadian Public Radio (Feb 29, 2008), American
Public Media’s
FutureTense
program (Feb 28, 2008)
ComputerWorld (this article has some errors in it),
UPI
News Track Top News,
Public
Radio and
NetworkWorld.
At least 40 newspapers around the world carried this story.
- Danish National Broadcasting covered our work on
STOP on Oct. 29, 2008.
-
Security
Management Magazine called our work on STOP “pioneering” in
coverage in their June 2008 issue.
- 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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