Anupam Joshi named Director of the UMBC Center for Artificial Intelligence (CAI)
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that Anupam Joshi has been named as the director of the UMBC Center for Artificial Intelligence (CAI) effective September 1, 2026. Anupam brings a wealth of experience to this new role. This appointment complements Anupam’s current role as vice provost & chief AI officer. In addition, the CAI will now be a campus level center reporting to the provost. The elevation of the CAI from a COEIT center to a campus center was approved by the deans and presented to the faculty senate at the December 2025 meeting.
In this role, Anupam will lead UMBC's research strategy in AI and integrate it more closely with AI's growing influence on pedagogy, on advances within the disciplines themselves, and on the operation of the campus enterprise. The Center's core charge remains research and education: convening the more than 70 faculty and senior research staff affiliated with it across our colleges, building interdisciplinary teams positioned to compete for large-scale extramural awards, strengthening graduate and undergraduate training in AI, and deepening partnerships with federal agencies, national laboratories, and the private sector in the Baltimore–Washington region. As a campus-level center, CAI will also serve as the bridge between AI scholarship and the rest of the university. Anupam will work closely with the Faculty Development Center, the vice provost for faculty affairs, and shared governance so that faculty in every discipline have access to the expertise, tools, and professional development they need to use AI responsibly and effectively in their teaching and scholarship. The intent is that advances made within the Center inform how UMBC teaches, how it supports its faculty, and how it runs.
In addition to this update, we want to thank Anupam for his leadership of the UMBC Cybersecurity Institute (UCI), from which he will step down as a part of this leadership transition. He has been instrumental in launching UCI with support from the then vice president of research, Dr. Geoff Summers, in 2012. Anupam served as the technical lead in USM’s successful 2013 bid with MITRE to establish the National Cybersecurity FFRDC (NCF), which supports NIST and its cyber-community stakeholders. He has provided strong thought leadership for the UCI over the past 13 years, and was responsible, working with other campus leaders, to secure significant base funding for UMBC in 2022 to support UMBC’s cybersecurity efforts in research, education, workforce and economic development. This funding, in part, has since led to the hire of 10 new faculty members across our three colleges in the area of Cybersecurity.
We are pleased to share that Alan Sherman has been named as the new interim director for UCI. Alan, a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering who joined UMBC in 1989, directs the Cyber Defense Lab, is a cryptographer whose research spans high-integrity election systems and formal analysis of cryptographic protocols, and has led UMBC's Department of Defense and National Science Foundation Scholarship for Service cybersecurity scholarship programs for more than a decade.
We also want to express our deep gratitude to Tim Finin, who served as CAI’s founding director. Tim joined UMBC in 1991 as chair of the Computer Science department and held the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair in Engineering. Over a career spanning five decades, he has made foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, particularly in knowledge representation and reasoning, multi-agent systems, and the semantic web. He helped lead the development of the KQML agent communication language under the DARPA/NSF Knowledge Sharing Effort, served on the W3C working group that standardized the OWL ontology language, and led the creation of the Swoogle semantic web search engine. His recent work on knowledge graphs and agentic systems shows that he remains at the leading edge of the field. Tim is a Fellow of both the ACM and AAAI, a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award, and was named UMBC Presidential Research Professor in 2012; he has also served as an AAAI Councilor and on the board of the Computing Research Association. Just as important as any of this, Tim has been a generous mentor and colleague, and many of the faculty and researchers now shaping AI at UMBC and elsewhere trained with him. Tim is retiring and transitioning to emeritus status, and we are thankful that he will remain engaged with the Center's research. We owe him our thanks for building CAI’s strong foundations and for thirty-five years of service to UMBC.
Please join us in congratulating Anupam and Alan in their new leadership roles, and in thanking Tim for his remarkable contributions.
Sincerely,
Manfred H.M. van Dulmen
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Karl V. Steiner
Vice President for Research and Creative Achievement