Faculty Profile: Dr. Anthony F. Norcio

“The students tell me they work quite hard, but they also tell me they learn so much.”

Dr. Anthony F. Norcio, a Professor in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC, brings his extensive background to teaching students both online and face-to-face. Dr. Norcio has served as the Co-Director (with Dr. Marion J. Ball) of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center for Health Informatics. Dr. Norcio has served as an external advisor to Pan American Health Organization on computing and health informatics and has served in a similar capacity to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He has also served as a Computer Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of the Naval Research Laboratory; and he has also served as the Scientific Advisor to the Mathematical, Computer, and Information Sciences Division of the Office of Naval Research. He regularly serves on planning and program committees for national and international conferences.

Dr. Norcio describes his online master’s students as “highly motivated professionals who have high expectations from the courses.” “Equally important,” says Dr. Norcio, “is the fact that the students are not disappointed by the e-learning experience at UMBC.” Commenting about the academic rigors of the online program, Dr. Norcio says, “The students tell me they work quite hard, but they also tell me they learn so much.”

Dr. Norcio's research interests are in the theoretical and applied areas of software/systems design, intelligent users interfaces (including voice systems), and health informatics. His current work concerns the design and construction of cognitive users models, performance models, and task models that can form the rules that underlie intelligent and adaptive interfaces to information systems for dynamic decision-support environments. This research focuses on health systems, intelligent tutoring/help systems, air traffic control systems, and the internationalization of interfaces. This work relies heavily upon the use of cognitive theories of decision-making as well as fuzzy logic and neural networks.

Dr. Norcio is a Senior Member of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society; he is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery as well as the American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Norcio also directs the User System Environment Research Laboratory (USER Lab) and has an extensive list of publications. Dr. Norcio has mentored a number of Ph.D graduates and is directing a number of current doctoral students. With respect to teaching, Dr. Norcio regularly teaches courses in the areas of Systems Design and Human-Computer Interaction.

Additional information about Dr. Anthony F. Norcio can be found at http://www.research.umbc.edu/~norcio/.