Prof. Ronald Larsen came to the University of Pittsburgh as dean and professor in 2002. Prior to accepting the deanship at SIS, he was executive director of the Maryland Applied Information Technology Initiative (MAITI), a consortium of ten universities, from 1999 to 2002. From 1996 to 1999, he was assistant director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys (DARPA) Information Technology Office (ITO), where he developed and managed research programs in information management, digital libraries, and cross-lingual information services, including machine translation. Prior to that, he held a variety of administrative and research positions at the University of Maryland (1985-96), and a variety of technical, research, and administrative positions at NASA (1968-85).

Dr. Larsen has many years in government and academia developing and managing large scale research programs, administering academic programs, teaching, and conducting research. During his tenure at NASA he initiated the agencys research program in Computer Science. At the time of his departure from DARPA, he had launched the single largest research and technology development program in the Information Technology Office, a program in cross-lingual information retrieval and digital libraries called TIDES, or Translingual Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization. This program continues to this day.