Richard Furuta is a faculty member at Texas A&M University where he is a
Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Director of the Center for the
Study of Digital Libraries. and Director of the Hypermedia Research Laboratory.

Dr. Furuta received the B.A. degree from Reed College in 1974, the M.S. degree
in Computer Science from the University of Oregon in 1978, and the Ph.D. degree
in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1986.

Dr. Furuta's current areas of research include digital libraries, digital
humanities, hypermedia systems and models, structured documents, and document
engineering.  He also has studied applications in computer supported
cooperative work, software engineering, visual programming, document structure
recognition from bitmapped sources, and management systems for
three-dimensional-gesture-based user interfaces.  In the area of Digital
Libraries, he was one of the founders of the 1994 and 1995 Digital Libraries
Conferences, which subsequently became the ACM Digital Libraries series, and
later merged with the IEEE-CS series to form the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference
on Digital Libraries (JCDL).  He will be program chair for JCDL 2009 and was
program chair for ACM Digital Libraries 2000.  He currently serves on the
Steering Committee for ACM/IEEE-CS JCDL and was its chair from 2001-2005.  He
also is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Digital Libraries.

Many of Dr. Furuta's current research projects are highly interdisciplinary,
especially those in the area of Digital Humanities.  These current projects
include the Cervantes Project, centered on the iconic author of Don Quixote,
the Picasso Project, which is creating a digital reasoned catalog that already
contains more than 10,000 of Picasso's art works, and the Nautical Archaeology
Digital Library, in conjunction with the campus' Institute for Nautical
Archaeology.

In other technical activities, Dr. Furuta has been co-program chair for ACM
Document Engineering 2002, co-program chair for ACM Hypertext '93, program
chair for Electronic Publishing '90, co-program chair of the 1991 DC ACM
Chapter annual symposium, Chair of ACM SIGLINK from 1993-1995, member of the
ACM SIG Board/SIG Governing Board Executive Committee from 1997-2001, and has
served on many other program committees, conference committees, steering
committees, and editorial boards.