Craig Warren Thompson

Office/Home: 340B ENGR, U Arkansas / 227 W. 29th Court, Fayetteville, AR72701

Contact: 479-575-6519-office, 479-521-2068-home, ,

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, May 1984.
M.A. Computer Science, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, August 1977.
B.S. Mathematics, StanfordUniversity, Stanford, California, June 1971.

Employment

2003-present – Professor & Acxiom Data Engineering Chair, Computer Science and Computer Engineering Department, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701
1995-2003 – President, Object Servicesand Consulting, Inc., DARPA/SBIR R&D contracts and consulting.
1981-1995 – Senior Member of Technical Staff and Research Manager, Object Technology, Multimedia, and Database Systems Branches, Computer Science Lab, Central Research Labs, Texas Instruments.
1977-1981 – Lecturer, Computer Science Department, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Taught graduate AI and DBMS. Member, Graduate Admissions Committee and Undergraduate Studies Committee. Directed 22 teaching assistants.

Students Supervised in the Last Five Years

March-October 2004: James Matt Doyle, Ciprian Caloianu, Kevin Smith, Oladayo Olagunju
June-December 2004: Jared Allen, Quang Duong (robot agent interface)

Experience

software architectures, middleware design patterns, agent systems, grids, services, traders. hypermedia, database systems including OODBs, AI, natural language interface, virtual office, standards.

Main Projects

Everything is Alive Agent System. Developing application independent modular agent system – plugins inisitalize agent capabilities; agents send each other messages in XML.
Acxiom Projects. Developing portioning and failover capability for grid nodes and automating operator flows.
Key Contributor, Agent-Supported Information Visualization, $224K subcontract to ScenPro on Phase II AFRL SBIR contract, 2001-2003.
Co-Principal Investigator, Message*Log Reliable Messaging for Logistics Planning, $1.1M contract, DARPA Ultra*Log Program, 2001-2003. Developing survivable adaptable message transport for Cougaar agent system including policy management control.
Principal Investigator, Agility: Agent -Ility Architecture, $1.9M contract, DARPA Control of Agent-based Systems Program, 1998-2002. Led 4-5 member team to develop three agent grid services: web-scalable trader, eGents (agents that communicate via email), and web-enabled menu-based natural language query capability.
Principal Investigator, Scaling Object Service Architectures to the Internet, $2.8M contract, DARPA Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization Program, 1995-1999. Led 5-7 member team to develop intermediary architecture for inserting modular middleware via Web proxies. Demonstrated annotation service, performance monitor service, and repository service.
Co-Principal Investigator and Co-Architect, Open OODB, $5.5M contract, DARPA Persistent Object Base Program, 1990-1995. Led 5-10 member team to develop C++ and Lisp Open OODB. Message-bus architecture directly influenced OMG Object Management Architecture and OMG Object Services Architecture. architectures. Organized DARPA Open OODB Workshops I-IV. Field tested Open OODB at 25 sites in ‘93-95.
Team Lead and Co-Architect, TI Zeitgeist OODB Project, 1984-1990. Developed modular OODB in Lisp. Led to DARPA Open OODB project. Used by TI internal CAD project.
Team Lead, Panorama CommonTools Hypermedia Project, Texas Instruments, 1987-1989. Led to: Lead Architect, Electronic Shopping Mall Authoring Toolkit for Telaction, a JC Penney subsidiary developing a pre-Web pioneering interactive TV home shopping experiment where the home viewer navigated an electronic mall using cable TV and touch-tone phone. Field tested in Chicago, 1988.
Co-inventor and Lead Developer, Menu-Based Natural Language Interface (MBNLI) technology, 1982-1986. New AI natural language interface paradigm: user selects phrases from menus to make up complex English queries and commands. Demo won $48M DoD contract. Basis for three TI products.
Lead Developer, RTMS: Relational Table Management System, 1981-1984. First industry OODB-RDB product, TI Explorer Lisp Machine.

Selected Papers

C. Thompson, “Agents, Grids, and Middleware,” IEEE Internet Computing, Sep/Oct 2004.
C. Thompson and P. Parkerson, “DBMS[me], Architectural Perspectives Column, IEEE Internet Computing, May/Jun 2004.
C. Thompson, “Everything is Alive,” Architectural Perspectives Column, IEEE Internet Computing, Jan/Feb 2004.
B. Brown, P. Morris, C. Thompson, “SUO Communicator: Agent-based Support for Small Unit Operations,” IEEE Integration of Knowledge Intensive Multi-Agent Systems (KIMAS), Cambridge, MA, October 1-3, 2003,

Allsopp, D.N., Beautement, P., Bradshaw, J.M., Durfee, E.H., Kirton, M., Knoblock, C.A., Suri, N., Tate, A. and Thompson, C.W. (2002) Coalition Agents Experiment: Multi-Agent Co-operation in an International Coalition Setting, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations (KSCO-2002), Toulouse, France, 23-24 April 2002. Revised for KSCO special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 17, No. 3, May/June 2002
Wells, Ford, Thompson, Bannon. Msg*Log: E-mail Based Agent Messaging to Improve Robustness in a Distributed Logistics Planner, Software Technology Conference, Salt Lake City, 2 May 2001. Re-published in The DoD Software Tech News Newsletter, Special Issue on Software Agents Part I, Vol. 4, No. 4, Oct. 2001.
Thompson et. al., Final Report: Agility Project, DARPA CoABS contract, 1998-2002.

Thompson et. al., Intermediary Architecture. ACM Computing Surveys, Special Issue on Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization, 1999.
Thompson et. al., Final Report: Scaling Object Service Architectures to the Internet, DARPA IC&V contract, 1995-1998.
Organizer and Workshop Report, OMG-DARPA Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures, 1998.
Thompson, Linden, Filman, Thoughts on OMA-NG:The Next Generation Object Management Architecture, OMG document ormsc/97-09-01.
Editor, Object Services Architecture (OSA), OMG Document 92-08-01 (available to OMG members), Object Services Task Force, Object Management Group, 1992. Architecture for the OMG basic object services, led to CORBAservices.

Organizer, ANSI X3H7 Technical Committee on Object Information Management, 1992.
Co-author, Object Management Architecture (OMA) Reference Model in Object Management Architecture Guide, Object ManagementGroup, 1990. The central OMG object-bus-plus-services architecture was patterned after the Open OODB architecture.
Vice-chair and co-author, Reference Model on Object Data Management, OODB Task Group, Database Systems Study Group, ANSI X3/SPARC, 1991. Characterized OODBs, precursor to OMG OMA though published later. Chaired First Workshop on OODB Standardization, X3 OODBTG, Atlantic City, 1990.

Wells, Blakeley, Thompson. “Architecture of an Open Object-Oriented Database Management System,” IEEE Computer, October, 1992. 1989 version of this paper fed the OODBTG and OMG OMA/OSA above.

Tennant, Bate, Corey, Davis, Kline, Oren, Rajinikanth, Saenz, Stenger, Thompson. “Software Innovations for the Texas Instruments Explorer Computer,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 73, No. 12, December, 1985.
Thompson, Tennant, Ross, Saenz. “Building Usable Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces to Databases,” Proceedings of the 9th Very Large Database Conference, Florence, Italy, October, 1983.
Tennant, Ross, Saenz, Miller, Thompson. “Menu-Based Natural Language Understanding,” Proceedings of the 21st Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'83), MIT, June, 1983.

Professional Activities

IEEE Senior Member, ACM member; OMG member (1990-2002), and W3C member (1998-1999). Organized and co-chaired OMG Agent WorkingGroup 1998-2002. Organized and co-chaired OMG Internet Special Interest Group 1995-1998.
Architectural Perspectives Column and Member of Editorial Board, IEEE Internet Computing
40 papers, 7 patents issued, key patent award, 2 team achievement awards.

Last updated: 1 January 2003 - page 1