Craig Thompson

Professional Bio

Dr. Thompson is a Professor and the Charles Morgan / Acxiom Graduate Research Chair in Database in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.  He received a B.S. from Stanford in Mathematics in 1971 and an M.A and Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin in 1977 and 1984 respectively.  He taught graduate AI and database courses at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from 1977 to 1981. He was a Senior Member of Technical Staff and a Research Manager in the Central Research Labs at Texas Instruments from 1981 to 1995.  He co-founded and served as President of Object Services and Consulting, Inc. (OBJS) from 1995 to 2003.  He joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas in July 2003.  He was elected to IEEE Fellow in 2005 "for contributions to artificial intelligence, database management, and middleware."

Thompson has a strong record of industrial research and external funding (principal investigator for $18.6M in IR&D, DARPA, SBIR, and industry projects since 1981).  He is a nationally recognized leader in object and agent technology standards (OMG, FIPA, X3H7, X3/OODBTG).  His work has had reasonable impact in several fields - database systems, software architecture, multi-agent systems ,and human-computer interfaces. Thompson holds seven patents, is on the Editorial Board of IEEE Internet Computing, has published over 40 papers in books, journals and conferences, has organized several workshops, and has supervised eleven masters and five bachelors honors theses.  His publications have appeared in Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Computer, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE Intelligent Systems, ACM Computing Surveys, and International Journal of Computer Standards and Interfaces.  He has consulted for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Microelectronic and Computer Technology Corp. (MCC), National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Consortium, and legal firms in the area of patent infringement.  His background and research interests span agents, grids, scalability, adaptability, survivability, ontologies, web object models, compositional middleware, web and object services, aspect-oriented software engineering, virtual enterprises, object database systems, and natural language interfaces.

At Texas Instruments, Thompson co-developed Relational Table Management System (RTMS), one of the first OODBs, and co-invented Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces (NLMenu), a completion-based interface that that makes usable, maintainable natural language interfaces possible.  Both were products on the TI Explorer Lisp Machine.  NLMenu was deployed in the IONDS G/AIT and DARPA/USN FRESH programs in the mid-1980s.  In 1988 he led development of a content authoring system for Telaction Interactive Television Electronic Mall, a system that was field tested in Chicago in 1988, a near-miss precursor to the World Wide Web.  Between 1990 and 1995, Thompson was co-principal investigator (PI) on the DARPA Open Object-Oriented Database System (Open OODB) project to build an extensible object-bus-plus-services-based OODB-RDBMS, today called a service-oriented architecture (SOA).  This project influenced the computing industry move towards distributed object middleware via the idea of an object bus used to connect object services.  Thompson co-authored the Object Management Group (OMG) Object Management Architecture Guide (OMA) "Reference Model" (1990) and the OMG Object Services Architecture (1992).  In addition, he co-authored the X3 Database Systems Study Group OODB Task Force Reference Model on Object Data Management, a reference model that deconstructed OODBs into component capabilities, making comparison and standards possible.

At OBJS, Thompson served as President and as principal investigator on the DARPA IC&V contract Scaling Object Services Architectures to the Internet (1995-1998), the DARPA CoABS contract Agility:  Agent -Ility Architecture (1998-2002), as Co-PI on the DARPA Ultra*Log contract Msg*Log:  Reliable Messaging for Logistics Planning (2001-2002), and as Investigator on the AFRL SBIR II subcontract Agent Supported Information Visualization (2001-2003).  During this time, he co-chaired the OMG Internet Platform Special Interest Group (1995-1998), chartered to merge the OMG OMA architecture with Internet and Web standards to enable large-scale Internet-enabled object-based distributed computing, and also co-chaired the OMG Agent Platform Special Interest Group (1998-2001), chartered to meld distributed object and multi-agent systems.

At University of Arkansas, Thompson continues to teach undergraduate and graduate AI and database courses as well as the CSCE Department's Senior Design/Capstone course.  He is leading several projects:  the Everything is Alive (EiA) project to develop a plug-in based agent system; the RFID Agent Middleware project that is developing soon-to-be open source middleware for the RFID community; the Soft Controller project aimed at attaching grammars to things and using device interface discovery to download these interfaces to a really universal remote;  the Grid DBMS project aimed at investigating terabyte sized synthetic data generation, grid indexing, work flow automation, digital rights, knowledge-based authentication, and aspect-oriented software architectures in grid computing.  Portions of the latter project are funded by Acxiom Corporation and Oracle Corporation.