Paul Thompson received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. His thesis was on probabilistic information retrieval. He has worked in the field of information studies for over 25 years. He has published numerous papers, journal articles and book chapters, and has served as a reviewer for various conferences, journals, and the National Science Foundation. He has been on the program committee of many ACM SIGIR conferences and has been on the program committee of the NSF-NIJ Symposium on Intelligence and Security Informatics since its inception in 2003.
From 1986-88, he was an assistant professor at Drexel University's
College of Information Studies. From 1988-93, he was a member
of PRC, Inc's (now part of Northrop Grumman) artificial intelligence
development group, where he conducted research in natural language
understanding and information retrieval. From 1993 until 2001,
he worked for West Publishing Company (now West Group), conducting
research on natural language understanding, information retrieval,
machine learning / text categorization, and text mining. At West
he became the lead research scientist. After joining Dartmouth
College's Thayer School of Engineering and Institute for Security
Technology Studies in 2001, he continued his earlier research
and began new research in the areas of semantic hacking, the application
of Semantic Web technology to sensor networks, and question answering.
He is currently a research associate professor in the Computer
Science Department at Dartmouth College.