Paul McNamee Senior Computer Scientist Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Laurel, Maryland 20723-6099 Phone: (443) 778-3816 Fax: (443) 778-6904 Email: paulmac@apl.jhu.edu

Abbreviated Biography

I am a member of the Research and Technology Development Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). My group, the System and Information Sciences Group, performs works in applied computer science and has interests in distributed information access, human language technologies (e.g., information retrieval & information extraction), video surveillance, probabilistic inference and reasoning, and advanced software engineering. We support a number of federal and DoD sponsors.

My technical interests are in human language technologies, especially cross-language information retrieval, and information extraction (mining information from unstructured text). I am currently working on the following projects:

• HAIRCUT: The Hopkins Automated Information Retriever for Combing Unstructured Text. HAIRCUT is a prototype Information Retreival system that uses a variety of terms (words, stems, character n-grams). The system is being developed in Java and is a long-time partcipant in international competitions such as the DARPA / NIST sponsored Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), CLEF, and NTCIR evaluations.
• An internal R&D effort investigating the use of support vector machines to estimate joint transition and emission probabilities in lattice-based tagging applications.

Former projects include:

• An Army Research Office (ARO) project investigating an optimization technique called automated memoization. This software engineering tool enables programmers to improve the run-time performance of their code by storing results of repititive calculations without changing a single line of code. Downloads are available for C++ and Common Lisp.
• The DARPA-sponsored Integrated Submarine Stealth Information Processing System (ISSIPS). This project modelled complex tactical and oceanographic environments and provided real-time advisement to a submarine crew on how to better plan and manage submarine operations.

I am a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). A partial list of my scholarly publications is available. I have an Erdos number of 3.

Johns Hopkins University - Teaching

An adjunct faculty member in the Computer Science Department of the Johns Hopkins University's Engineering and Applied Science Program for Professionals, I teach courses in object-oriented programming and artificial intelligence. The program offers students the opportunity to earn a masters degree in Computer Science by taking courses at several centers in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. areas.

• 605.744: Information Retrieval covers the automatic indexing and retrieval of unstructured textual information.
• 605.435: Distributed Development on the World Wide Web covers web topics such as HTML, Applets, CGI scripts and servlets, and JavaScript while teaching intermediate-level Java programming.
• 605.201: Introduction to Programming Using Java is a course designed for students without the programming experience needed to continue studies in the JHU part-time program. Topics include the basic syntax, control methods and data structures of the language. This course is a replacement for 605.201: Introduction to C++ Programming
• 605.451: Principles of Artificial Intelligence introduces various methods, languages, and techniques in Artifical Intelligence including search, natural language, logic, Lisp, Prolog, and neural networks.
• 605.452: Artificial Intelligence Programming expands on 605.451 by covering examples of AI programs in greater detail and having students work on projects in search, natural language, simulation, game-playing, all using the Common Lisp language.