On June 14, 2006, James A. Hendler was appointed senior constellation professor of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he became a professor at that institute starting on January 1, 2007. Hendler has appointments in Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences, and served as the Dean for Information Technology and Web Science from 2009 to 2012. In 2012 he became the Head of the Computer Science Department at RPI and in 2013 he became the Director of the RPI Institute for Data Exploration and Applications.[9] In 2017, he also became the Rensselaer lead of the joint RPI-IBM Center for Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning and Semantics, (HEALS)[10] a member of the IBM Artificial Intelligence Horizons Network.[11] In 2019, Hendler was named Director of the RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration,[12] a large joint project between IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2022, Hendler became the Founding Director of Rensselaer's Future of Computing Institute.[13]
He is also the Editor in Chief Emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and was the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.
He is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board and a former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). During his tenure there, he was responsible for projects such as the Control of Agent Based Systems (CoABS) program which led to the creation of other Agent-based projects: Taskable Agent Software Kit (TASK) and DARPA's Agent Markup Language (DAML) - the latter of which was involved in funding the emerging Semantic Web area.[15]
Hendler served as an "Internet Web Expert" for the U.S. government, providing guidance to the Data.gov project,[16] and in September 2013 he was appointed as the Open Data Advisor for NY State.[17] In 2015, he was appointed a member of the US Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee (HSSTAC) and in 2016 appointed to the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information. In 2017, he became a member of the Director's Advisory Committee for the National Security Directorate at PNNL. In 2018, he was appointed chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC, formerly USACM) [18] and in 2021 became chair of the ACM's Global Technology Policy Council.
Since 2018, Hendler has been a regular participant on the Roundtable Panel at WAMC radio.
Books
Linking the World’s Information: Essays on Tim Berners-Lee’s Invention of the World Wide Web, O. Seneviratne, J. Hendler (eds), ACM Press, 2023.
Social Machines: The coming collision of artificial intelligence, social networking and humanity w/Alice Mulvehill, (2016) ApressISBN978-1-4842-1157-1.[20]
^Hendler, James (1986). Integrating Marker-Passing and Problem-Solving: A Spreading-Activation Approach to Improved Choice in Planning (PhD thesis). Brown University. ProQuest303438400.
^Sirin, E.; Parsia, B.; Wu, D.; Hendler, J.; Nau, D. (2004). "HTN planning for Web Service composition using SHOP2". Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. 1 (4): 377. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2004.06.005.
^Wu, D.; Parsia, B.; Sirin, E.; Hendler, J.; Nau, D. (2003). "Automating DAML-S Web Services Composition Using SHOP2". The Semantic Web - ISWC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2870. pp. 195–210. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-39718-2_13. ISBN978-3-540-20362-9.