Robert M. Patton is a research associate with the Applied Software Engineering Research group of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is currently the principle investigator of the Orion Project, which focuses on the application of intelligent software agents for sensor data fusion. In addition, Dr. Patton works on a number of different projects involving software agents, computational intelligence, and applications to information fusion and text mining. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida.