Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. The 2011 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 14, 2011, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. To attend, please RSVP online.
This year's Alumnus of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Ralph Semmel (’92 Ph.D., Computer Science) who is currently the Director of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. As Director, Dr. Semmel leads the nation’s largest University Affiliated Research Center, which performs research and development on behalf of the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other Federal agencies. The Laboratory has more than 5,000 staff members, of whom more than two-thirds are engineers and scientists.
Prior to becoming Director, Dr. Semmel served as the founding Head of APL’s Applied Information Sciences Department and Infocentric Operations Business Area. Dr. Semmel also served in a variety of other executive and senior leadership positions at the Laboratory including Business Area Executive for Infocentric Operations, Assistant Head of the Power Projection Systems Department, Business Area Executive for Science and Technology, Deputy Director of the Research and Technology Development Center, and Supervisor of the System and Information Sciences Group. In addition to his APL responsibilities, Dr. Semmel served from 1997 through 2010 as Chair of the graduate programs in Computer Science, Information Assurance, and Information Systems Engineering for Johns Hopkins University’s Engineering for Professionals program. In 2011, he was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the University. Dr. Semmel also has been program co-chair and on the program committees for several major international conferences, and served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. He has published more than 40 papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, database systems, and software engineering.
Dr. Semmel also has led and continues to serve on a variety of Government science and technology boards, panels, and committees. Before joining the Laboratory in 1986, Dr. Semmel held leadership and technical positions with Wang Laboratories, MITRE Corporation, and the U.S. Army. Dr. Semmel received a B.S. in Engineering from the United States Military Academy, an M.S. in Systems Management from the University of Southern California, an M.S. in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC.
Dr. Semmel was the eleventh person to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science for his dissertation entitled A knowledge-based approach to automated query formulation. His dissertation research, which was supervised by Professor James Mayfield, tackled the difficult problem of enabling people to access and query a large, complex databases without having to master the details of their internal structure and naming conventions. His approach combined a strong theoretical foundation with a collection of novel heuristics to produce a system that solved the problem and also supported effective and practical applications. He evaluated his work on a real database in use at the Space Telescope Science Institute that comprised nearly one hundred interconnected relational tables. This research was forward looking and one of the first to address problems that are just now becoming critical as the scale and availability of data has reached a tipping point. Companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM are now urgently tackling the same problems that Dr. Semmel first define and framed more than twenty years ago.