Who We Are

Our History

Clergy

Staff

Leadership

Our Synagogue

News & Schmooze

Upcoming Events

Member Profiles

Request Information

How to become a TI member

M'Kom Torah - A Place of Torah

Photo Gallery

Jim Hendler: From TI to Tetherless World.........posted Jul 14, 2006

TI Co-President Jim Hendler, a renowned computer scientist and World Wide Web researcher, has been appointed senior constellation professor of the "Tetherless World Research Constellation" at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

He will officially join RPI on Jan. 1, but he doesn''t expect to leave Rockville until the end of May.

Hendler has been one of TI''s most active members since he and his family joined the synagogue in 1986. A native of Queens, N.Y., he previously served a couple of terms as a TI board vice president and chaired the Religious Practices Committee three different times.

At RPI, he will focus the work of the new Tetherless World Constellation on increasing access to information at any time and place without the need for a tether to a specific computer or device. Researchers envision an increasingly Web-accessible world in which personal digital assistants, cameras, music-listening devices, cell phones, laptops and other technologies converge to offer the user interactive data and communication.

Jim currently directs the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery and co-directs the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

"My research focuses on what might be called ''Web science'' - understanding the Web in its full richness, exploring the underlying technologies that make it work and its social and policy implications, and developing new technologies to keep the Web growing ever more useful as it reaches further into our lives," he said in an official statement issued to the press by RPI. "We envision a tetherless Web."

Widely recognized as one of the inventors of the Semantic Web, Jim says this extension of the World Wide Web will bring new information resources to the Web by enabling computers to interpret the meaning and context of words and numbers. This technology could be used to bring informative databases - from Internet business to basic biology research - to the Web in more searchable and usable ways, he says.

"As a simple example, imagine being able to search the Web for ''the scene where the guy throws his hat at a statue and its head falls off'' and finding the right clip from the movie Goldfinger to download to your hand-held video device," Hendler explained.

At Rensselaer, Jim will play a lead role in structuring the new Tetherless World Constellation. Led by outstanding faculty in fields of strategic importance, Rensselaer constellations are focused on a specific research area and comprise a multidisciplinary mix of senior and junior faculty and postdoctoral and graduate students.

Jim''s spouse, Terry Horowit, will move with him to the upstate New York community where she hopes to continue and expand her work as a cantor. Quips Jim: "If anyone wants to volunteer to coordinate Torah readers, which Terry has been doing for more than a decade, I bet she''d love to hear from them."

Their daughter Sharone is a sophomore at Brandeis University.