The UMBC-ACM student chapter has been working under the insightful guidance of Prof. Houbing Herbert Song, Prof. Tim Finin and Prof. Tim Oates, all are Professors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Current Advisor:
Houbing Herbert Song (IEEE Fellow & ACM Distinguished Scientist) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, in August 2012.
He is currently an Associate Professor of Information Systems, an Affiliate Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and the Director of the Security and Optimization for Networked Globe Laboratory (SONG Lab, www.SONGLab.us), University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD. He has been the Founding Chair of Trustworthy Internet of Things (TRUST-IoT) Working Group within IEEE IoT Technical Community since 2024. He was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) in 2024. He is currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief (Co-EiC) of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (2025-present). He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI) (2023-present), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2021-present), and IEEE Journal on Miniaturization for Air and Space Systems (J-MASS) (2020-present). He was an Associate Technical Editor for IEEE Communications Magazine (2017-2020) and an Associate Editor for IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2020-2024). He is the editor of 10+ books, the author of more than 100 articles and the inventor of two patents. His research interests include AI/machine learning/big data analytics, cyber-physical systems/internet of things, and cybersecurity and privacy. His research has been sponsored by federal agencies (including National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, US Department of Transportation, and Federal Aviation Administration, among others) and industry. His research has been featured on popular news media outlets, including IEEE Spectrum, IEEE GlobalSpec’s Engineering360, IEEE Transmitter, insideBIGDATA, StateTech Magazine, Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), Security Magazine, CXOTech Magazine, Solutions Review, EdTech Magazine, PYMNTS, Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, and New Atlas.
Dr. Song is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, and a Full Member of Sigma Xi. Dr. Song has been a Highly Cited Researcher identified by Web of Science since 2021. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2020-present), an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor (2024-present), an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer (2024-present), an IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) Distinguished Lecturer(2024-present), an IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) Distinguished Lecturer (2023-present) and an IEEESystems Council Distinguished Lecturer (2023-present). Dr. Song received Research.com Rising Star of Science Award in 2022, IEEE 2021 Harry Rowe Mimno Award, 2024 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Publication Spotlight, and 10+ Best Paper Awards from major international conferences. He has been an IEEE Impact Creator since 2023. He was the Faculty Advisor for the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines from 2020 to 2022.
Previous advisors:
Dr. Tim Finin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has over 30 years of experience in applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in information systems and language understanding. His current research is focused on the Semantic Web, mobile computing, analyzing and extracting information from text and online social media, and on enhancing security and privacy in information systems. He is AAAI Fellow, received an IEEE Technical Achievement award in 2009 and was selected as the UMBC Presidential Research Professor in 2012.
Finin received an S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held full-time positions at UMBC, Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory. He is the author of over 300 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. He participated in the DARPA/NSF Knowledge Sharing Effort and helped lead the development of the KQML agent communication language and was a member of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group that standardized the OWL Semantic Web language.
Finin has chaired of the UMBC Computer Science Department, served on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, been a AAAI councilor, and chaired several major research conferences. He is currently an editor-in-chief of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics and a co-editor of the Viewpoints section of the Communications of the ACM.
Dr. Tim Oates is an Oros Familty Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1989, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Prior to coming to UMBC in the Fall of 2001, he spent a year as a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 Dr. Oates won a prestigious NSF CAREER award. He is an author or co-author of more than 100 peer reviewed papers and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. His research interests include pattern discovery in time series, grammatical inference, graph mining, statistical natural language processing, robotics, and language acquisition.
