Jim is Director of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA), Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and Head of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA. He has authored over 200 technical papers in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing and high performance processing.
Jim’s research focuses on the future of the World Wide Web. One of the inventors of the Semantic web, Jim was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society, the IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. Jim also serves as an “Internet Web Expert” for the U.S. government, providing guidance to the Data.gov project.
As part of his work with the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer, Jim helped develop and application that utilizes the U.S government data warehouse, Data.gov, to provide scientists with easy and direct access to government data sets relevant to their research. Prior to the launch of the project, billions of bits of raw data provided by government agencies around the world were available to the public, but frequently in formats so difficult to use or so widely spread around the Web that they were virtually unusable to the public and scientists.
