Ralph D. Semmel | |
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Nationality | American |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Engineering, Computer Science |
Institutions | Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory |
Ralph D. Semmel is an American engineer and computer scientist. He became the eighth director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland on July 1, 2010. [1]
A native of Monroe, New York, Semmel earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point, a Master of Science degree in systems management from the University of Southern California, a Master of Science degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. [2]
Prior to joining APL, Semmel held leadership and technical positions with Wang Laboratories and the MITRE Corporation. [2] He joined APL in 1986 after serving in the U.S. Army. [2]
From 1997 to 2010, Semmel served as chair of the graduate programs in Computer Science, Information Assurance, and Information Systems Engineering for Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering’s ‘Engineering for Professionals’ program. [3]
In 2017, Semmel was named an "International Business Leader" by the World Trade Institute. [4] On May 24, 2019, Semmel delivered the commencement speech, and received an honorary associate of arts degree, at Howard Community College. [5] The Daily Record recognized Semmel as an "Influential Marylander" in an issue released March 29, 2019 [6] and as a top 30 "Power in Higher Education" in 2022. [7]
Under Semmel's leadership, the Lab had a wide variety of accomplishments, including the successful Pluto flyby of APL-built New Horizons, [8] [9] and the data modeling for the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center [10] and the successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which was the world's first planetary defense test mission. [11] APL was also selected multiple times as one of Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators [12] [13] and as ComputerWorld's Top 10 Best Places to Work in I.T. [14]
Semmel has published papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, database systems, and software engineering. [15] His published works include research on a prototype query tool for the U.S. Army, [16] automated query formation using an entity-relationship conceptual schema [17] as well as a prototype interface that would allow better data retrieval from the Hubble Telescope. [18] Semmel also did research on how to include context into conceptual schema, [19] integrated reengineered databases to support data fusion, [20] knowledge-based information access [21] and spacecraft distributed modeling and simulation. [22]
While at the University of Maryland, Semmel's dissertation discussed automated query formulation. [23]
Semmel also served as the co-chair for the Defense Science Board's task force report on Next-Generation Unmanned Undersea Systems. [24]
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
John Florian Sowa is an American computer scientist, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer design, and the inventor of conceptual graphs.
A conceptual graph (CG) is a formalism for knowledge representation. In the first published paper on CGs, John F. Sowa used them to represent the conceptual schemas used in database systems. The first book on CGs applied them to a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, computer science, and cognitive science.
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by Alan Stern, the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015, and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow, which became a mission to 486958 Arrokoth. It is the fifth space probe to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave the Solar System.
Object–role modeling (ORM) is used to model the semantics of a universe of discourse. ORM is often used for data modeling and software engineering.
In computer programming contexts, a data cube is a multi-dimensional ("n-D") array of values. Typically, the term data cube is applied in contexts where these arrays are massively larger than the hosting computer's main memory; examples include multi-terabyte/petabyte data warehouses and time series of image data.
A bitmap index is a special kind of database index that uses bitmaps.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is a not-for-profit university-affiliated research center (UARC) in Howard County, Maryland. It is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and employs 8,700 people as of 2024. APL is the nation's largest UARC.
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The G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering is the engineering college of the Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland.
In computer science, schema versioning and schema evolution, deal with the need to retain current data and software system functionality in the face of changing database structure. The problem is not limited to the modification of the schema. It, in fact, affects the data stored under the given schema and the queries posed on that schema.
Amit Sheth is a computer scientist at University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2007 to June 2019, he was the Lexis Nexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, director of the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, and a Professor of Computer Science at Wright State University. Sheth's work has been cited by over 48,800 publications. He has an h-index of 106, which puts him among the top 100 computer scientists with the highest h-index. Prior to founding the Kno.e.sis Center, he served as the director of the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.
Ronald Fagin is an American mathematician and computer scientist, and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is known for his work in database theory, finite model theory, and reasoning about knowledge.
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Dataspaces are an abstraction in data management that aim to overcome some of the problems encountered in data integration system. The aim is to reduce the effort required to set up a data integration system by relying on existing matching and mapping generation techniques, and to improve the system in "pay-as-you-go" fashion as it is used. Labor-intensive aspects of data integration are postponed until they are absolutely needed.
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Phokion G. KolaitisACM is a computer scientist who is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at UC Santa Cruz and a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research interests include principles of database systems, logic in computer science, and computational complexity.
Daniel Abadi is the Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. His primary area of research is database systems, with contributions to stream databases, distributed databases, graph databases, and column-store databases. He helped create C-Store, a column-oriented database, and HadoopDB, a hybrid of relational databases and Hadoop. Both database systems were commercialized by companies.