Staff Directory

Email:  mzemanko@nsf.gov Phone: (703) 292-8930 Fax: (703) 292-9073 Room: 1125 S Organization:  IIS Title:  Program Director Title:  Program Director - Information Integration & Informatics (III) Cluster

Maria Zemankova, Ph.D.
Program Director, Collaborative Systems Cluster
Information and Intelligent Systems Division (IIS)
Computer and Information Science and Egineering Directorate (CISE)
National Science Foundation (NSF)
4201 Wilson Blvd., #1125.13
Arlington, VA 22230

Email: mzemanko@nsf.gov
Phone: 703-292-8930
Fax: 703-292-9073

Maria Zemankova is managing proposals and awards in the area of data, information and knowledge management. This includes research and educational activities fundamental to the design, implementation, development, management, and use of databases, information retrieval, and knowledge-based systems across personal, organizational or global information systems. Topics include, but are not limited to novel data types (e.g., streams, graphs, links, tables, scientific/mathematical formulae/equations, complex structures, semi-structured or unstructured data), metadata, information, knowledge and process/event modeling; multimedia, geospatial and multidimensional information systems; query languages and processing; information search and retrieval, information presentation and interaction; information organization, interoperability, integration, summarization and visualization; data/information analysis, data mining, knowledge discovery and visualization; efficient data gathering and storage/archival; highly scalable, data-intensive and distributed/mobile information systems; systems architecture, implementation, performance and quality of service, optimization, and evolution; security/privacy issues; information flow, dynamic/evolutionary systems, change maintenance, and information life-cycle management.

Comprehensive information on projects funded in this area since 1998, including discussions of future search directions can be found at http://csr.bu.edu/idm2004/ .

Maria Zemankova completed grammar school and a computer programmer and operator school in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), received her B.S. (with Highest Honors) in Mathematics and Computing with minor in Psychology from the American University in Cairo in 1977, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Florida State University in 1979 and 1983, respectively.

From 1984 to 1988 she was on faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and held a visiting position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 1986 - 1987. Since 1988 she has been a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, in the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division for the Database and Expert Systems Program, Information and Data Management Program, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics, Information Technology Research, Science of Design and various cross-disciplinary initiatives, and served as the IIS Deputy Division Director 1995 - 1997. She was instrumental in the conception of initiatives "Research on Scientific Databases" and Digital Libraries. She spent a year (1993 - 1994) with The MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia as a Principal Scientist in the area of information systems, and a year (2000 - 2001) at a Visiting Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC), Cognitive Systems Branch working on retrieval, extraction and integration of medical information from a variety of sources, based on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and extending the current approaches to spatio-temporal issues and biodiversity and ecosystem domains.

Her research interests are in intelligent information systems; knowledge discovery in scientific and medical databases/information sources; information organization and tailored information access/delivery; process modeling and evolution in information systems; and management of uncertainty, reasoning and learning in knowledge-based systems.

Her publications include a monograph Fuzzy Relational Databases - a Key to Expert Systems co-authored with A. Kandel (Verlag TUV Rheinland, Koln, 1984) translated to Japanese by M. Mukaidono (Keigaku Publishing Co., Tokyo, 1987), five volumes of Methodologies for Intelligent Systems co-edited with Zbigniew Ras (ACM SIGART Press, 1986; North Holland, 1987, 1990; Springer Verlag, 1991, 1994), Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Future Directions, co-edited with Zbigniew Ras (Artificial Intelligence Series, Ellis Horwood Limited, London, 1990), and papers in journals, conference proceedings, or invited contributions to books. Maria Zemankova is Co-Editor-in-Chief with Larry Kerschberg and Zbigniew Ras of the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, served as the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, and has been on program or organizing committees of numerous conferences and workshops.

Dr. Zemankova served on the Advisory Board of the ACM SIGMOD (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Management of Data), on the Board of Directors of NAFIPS (North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society) and is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, NAFIPS and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. In 1992, she received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.