[4][5] Finin earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1971 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1980.

Prior to joining the UMBC, he held positions at the Unisys Paoli Research Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

He received the Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2009 "for pioneering contributions to distributed intelligent systems".

In 2013 he was named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for "significant contributions to the theory and practice of knowledge sharing in multiagent systems and on the Web, and for sustained service to the AI community".

In 2018, the Association for Computing Machinery named him an ACM Fellow for his contributions to the theory and practice of knowledge sharing in distributed systems and the World Wide Web.