Timothy Wilking Finin

Co-leader of the work on KQML, a language and protocol for communication among software agents and knowledge-based systems, Finin has served as an American Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in Baltimore County, Maryland. His research focused on the applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in information systems and included contributions to natural language processing, expert systems, the theory and applications of multiagent systems, the semantic web, and mobile computing.

Finin is known for his work on the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML), a language and protocol for communication among software agents and knowledge-based systems. He led the work on KQML along with Jay Weber of EITech, with contributions from many researchers. It was developed in the early 1990s as part of the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort, which was aimed at developing techniques for building large-scale knowledge bases that were shareable and reusable. While originally conceived of as an interface to knowledge-based systems, it was soon repurposed as an Agent Communication Language.

The KQML message format and protocol could be used to interact with an intelligent system, either by an application program or by another intelligent system. KQML's "performatives" are operations that agents perform on each other's knowledge and goal stores. Higher-level interactions such as contract nets and negotiation are built using these. KQML's "communication facilitators" coordinate the interactions of other agents to support knowledge sharing.

Finin also served as the advisor for the Ph.D. thesis work of Li Ding, who developed Swoogle at UMBC with funding from the US DARPA and National Science Foundation agencies. Swoogle is a search engine for Semantic Web ontologies, documents, terms, and data published on the Web. It employs a system of crawlers to discover RDF documents and HTML documents with embedded RDF content. Swoogle reasons about these documents and their constituent parts (e.g., terms and triples) and records and indexes meaningful metadata about them in its database.

Born in Walworth, Wisconsin, Finin held an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UMBC, he held positions at the Unisys Paoli Research Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the author of more than 350 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources.

He has organized several major conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications, ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, ACM Autonomous Agents Conference, ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing, and the International Semantic Web Conference. Finin has served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Web Semantics and has sat on the Editorial Board of several other journals. He has been a former AAAI councilor and Board member of the Computing Research Association (CRA).

In 2009 the IEEE Computer Society awarded him a Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering contributions to distributed intelligent systems," and in 2013 he was named a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for "significant contributions to the theory and practice of knowledge sharing in multiagent systems and on the Web, and for sustained service to the AI community."