
Prof. Tim Finin received his degrees from MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is currently the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair of Engineering and a Professor of computer science and electrical engineering with the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC). He has over 40 years of experience in applying AI to problems in information systems and language understanding. He has held positions at UMBC, Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory. His current research interests include knowledge graphs, analyzing and extracting information from text, and cybersecurity. He is a fellow of ACM and AAAI. He was a recipient of the IEEE Technical Achievement Award.

Dr. Xueqing Liu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research interests are natural language processing for security and software engineering. She earned her PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and bachelor's degree at IIIS, Tsinghua University, China. She has published at ACL, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, RE and VL/HCC, and has served the program committee in software engineering and NLP including ASE, TSE, ACL, etc. She co-authored microsoft/FLAML, an open-source software for automated machine learning with over 1 million downloads. She is a recipient of the ICSE-CSEE&T Distinguished Paper Award.