CRA joined over 30 other scientific societies and institutions in this event, which is organized annualy by CNSF to showcase to Members of Congress and staff the crucial role of the National Science Foundation in meeting the nation's research and education needs. CRA was represented at the Exhibition by Professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi and Ph.D. students Ruchita Bhargava, Lalana Kagal and Olga Ratsimor all from the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

The UMBC booth featured the NSF sponsored work of Professors Finin and Joshi on 'Pervasive Knowledge' in collaboration with other faculty colleagues including Professors Hillol Kargupta and Yelena Yesha. This work focuses on developing algorithms, infrastructure and applications to provide intelligent pervasive computing environments. In such environments, computing, control and communication devices disappear into our surroundings, providing ubiquitous and active support for people's needs in a natural and unintrusive way.

The UMBC team demonstrated two projects at the reception. One featured a software infrastructure that allows people to securely access and control location-specific wireless services from cellphones and PDAs. A second was a distributed datamining project in which a fleet of UMBC campus vehicles have been equipped with computers that wirelessly collect large amounts of performance data from the vehicle's systems, locally mine the data to extract meaningful information, and later wireless upload the results to a centralized system for fleet-level datamining.