Opening Remarks

Rear Admiral Douglas Small

Commander, Naval Information Warfare Command (COMNAVWAR)

Rear Adm. Doug Small is a 1988 graduate of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he received a Bachelor of Science in Physics. He also holds a doctorate degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Small’s operational tours included mechanical division officer and main propulsion assistant on USS Camden (AOE 2), in which he deployed in support of Operation Desert Storm, as well as combat systems officer (plankowner) on USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7). During Operation Iraqi Freedom he served as the first technical director of Joint Crew Composite Squadron (JCCS) 1, assembled by the Navy to assist with defeating then-prevalent radio-controlled improvised explosive devices (IED).

An engineering duty officer since 1997, Small had a number of tours in acquisition, starting at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division and then the Missile Defense Agency. Moving to the Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS), Small was the electronic warfare assistant and then the major program manager for above water sensors (PEO IWS 2), overseeing the development of improvements for the Navy in electronic warfare and radar. Following this tour he served as the executive assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition.

Small’s first flag assignment, in 2016, he was the program executive officer for Integrated Warfare Systems, where he led the team responsible for development, delivery, and sustainment of all surface navy combat and weapon systems. He assumed command of the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command in August 2020, leading a global workforce of 11,000 civilian and military professionals who design, develop, install, and support Navy’s networking, communications, information, and cyber capabilities and systems.

Small’s personal awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit, and Bronze Star; unit awards include the Army Meritorious Unit Commendation and various campaign and service awards.

George Galdorisi

Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific

George Galdorisi is a career naval aviator whose thirty years of active duty service included four command tours and five years as a carrier strike group chief of staff. He began his writing career in 1978 with an article in the U.S. Navy’s professional magazine, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

In addition to his Rick Holden thrillers published by Braveship Books, he has written thirteen other books distributed by mainstream publishers, including several bestselling novels in the rebooted Tom Clancy’s Op-Center series, including Out of the Ashes, Into the Fire, Scorched Earth, and Dark Zone.  With his longtime collaborator, Dick Couch, he coauthored the New York Times best seller, Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor the novelization of the Bandito Brothers/Relativity Media film.  He is also the author of The Kissing Sailor, which proved the identity of the two principals in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph; as well as over three-hundred articles in professional journals and other media.

George has received a number of national and international writing awards, including: the Navy League of the United States Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement, the Surface Navy Association Literary Award, the Navy League of Australia’s Annual Essay Competition, the Naval Helicopter Historical Association Mark Starr Pioneer Literary Award, and the Military Writers Society of America Silver Medal Award, among others. George speaks frequently at writing classes and seminars including: San Diego State University Writers Conference, La Jolla Writers Conference, San Diego Writer’s Ink, Southern California Writers Association, Coronado Writer’s Workshop, and other venues.

George is the Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures at the Navy’s Command and Control Center of Excellence in San Diego, California.  He and his wife Becky live in Coronado, California. Other than writing thrillers, he likes nothing more than connecting with readers. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter, and learn more about his books, blogs and other writing on his website: http://georgegaldorisi.com/ – especially his “Writing Tips,” – which offer useful advice for all writers from established authors to future best-selling writers.

Dr. Dale Moore

The Moore Group LLC

Dr. Dale L. Moore is the Founder and President of The Moore Group LLC, a strategy, innovation and transformation services company focused on engaging with clients to achieve world-class performance. Dale is an accomplished Senior Executive, Advisor, and Thought Leader with more than 35 years of success across the government, security and defense industries. His broad areas of expertise include strategic thinking and planning, creativity and innovation, leadership development, organizational learning, continuous process improvement, cultural change, and digital transformation. Dale is a Strategist, Innovator, Author, Speaker, Consultant and held a leadership position as the Director for Strategy and Innovation for DASN(RDT&E) where he led the development, deployment, and implementation of the Department of the Navy's 30 Year Research and Development Plan, and served part-time on the ASN(RDA) Agility Campaign and as a Department of the Navy Innovation Advisory Council (NIAC) Associate. He has served as the Director, Strategic Initiative Coordination and Execution for the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), and as the Director, Strategic Cell for the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD). Prior to these roles, Dale was the N-UCAS Chief Systems Engineer for the X-47B in PMA-268, the NAVAIR Lean Six Sigma "AIRSpeed" Deputy Corporate Deployment Champion, and the NAVAIR National Competency Lead for Materials Research and Engineering. For his exceptional leadership, he has been recognized by the Department of the Navy (DON) for the Meritorious Civil Service Award (3X). Dale obtained his doctorate in the Executive Leadership Program - EdD from The George Washington University, an MS SE in PD-21 Product Development/Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, as well as a BS ME in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Delaware. 

Dr. Chris Mattmann

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Chris Mattmann is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer (CTIO) and Division Manager for the Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Innovation Development Organization in the Information Technology and Solutions Directorate (ITSD) at NASA JPL. Dr. Mattmann is also JPL's first Principal Scientist in the area of Data Science. The designation of Principal is awarded to recognize sustained outstanding individual contributions in advancing scientific or technical knowledge, or advancing the implementation of technical and engineering practices on projects, programs, or the Institution. He has over 17 years of experience at JPL and has conceived, realized and delivered the architecture for the next generation of reusable science data processing systems for NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory, NPP Sounder PEATE, and the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Earth science missions. Mattmann's work has been funded by NASA, DARPA, DHS, NSF, NIH, NLM and by private industry and commercial partnerships. Mattmann was the first Vice President (VP) of Apache OODT (Object Oriented Data Technology), the first NASA project to enter the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and he led the project's transition from JPL to the ASF.

He contributes to open source as a Director at the Apache Software Foundation where he was one of the initial contributors to Apache Nutch as a member of its project management committee, the predecessor to the Apache Hadoop project. Mattmann is the progenitor of the Apache Tika framework, the digital "babel fish" and de-facto content analysis and detection framework that exists.

Mattmann is the Director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science (IRDS) group at USC and Adjunct Associate Professor. He teaches graduate courses in Content Detection & Analysis & in Search Engines & Information Retrieval. Mattmann has materially contributed to understanding of the Deep Web and Dark Web through the DARPA MEMEX project. Mattmann's work helped uncover the Panama Papers scandal.

Nand Mulchandani

Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC)

Nand Mulchandani serves as the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Mulchandani brings more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry as a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in the enterprise infrastructure and security software industries to his service in the government to help transform the Department of Defense in adopting next-generation AI and software technologies.

Prior to government service, Mulchandani was at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and remains a non-resident Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Mulchandani also served as the Vice President of Market Development and Strategy for Citrix, a leading provider of desktop virtualization and networking infrastructure. He joined Citrix through its acquisition of ScaleXtreme, where Mulchandani was the CEO and co-founder. Prior to his tenure at ScaleXtreme, Mulchandani served in various capacities as CEO, co-founder, senior executive, and entrepreneur-in-residence for a number of technology startups and companies including the venture capital firm Accel Partners, OpenDNS (funded by Sequoia Capital and Greylock, acquired by Cisco), VMware, Determina (funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield and USVP, acquired by VMware), and Oblix (funded by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, acquired by Oracle). Mulchandani started his career at Sun Microsystems as a compiler architect and holds a patent on dynamic code generation.

Mulchandani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Mathematics from Cornell University, a Master in Science in Management from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and a Master of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Session 1: Autonomy and Edge Computing

Moderator: Michael Tall

Mike Tall is the Battlespace Awareness Portfolio Coordinator for the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific.  He oversees a portfolio of 146 projects that are focused on gathering and turning surveillance and reconnaissance data into intelligence data.  This is done with unmanned vehicles in all domains, AI/ML both on the edge and on the network, stratospheric and small satellites, and decision aids for seabed and surface warfare.  In this role, he focuses on near term execution of long term strategies by working internally and externally to create and shape technologies by working with the projects to match ideas to Naval needs and then helps in finding the next step for funding for current technologies, respectively.

Session 2: Machine Learning in Operational Environments

Moderator: Dr. John Reeder

Dr. John David Reeder II is a Senior Research Engineer for the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC Pacific). Dr. Reeder’s research focuses on the application of Machine Learning techniques to the fields of Autonomous Systems, Intelligence Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR), and Electronic Warfare (EW). His research in autonomous systems concentrates on the robustness and trustworthiness of learned behaviors to improve human-autonomy teaming. His work in ISR and EW seeks to improve generalization and reliability of analysis tools by incorporating machine learning with existing tools, allowing them to work in scenarios beyond their original design.

Session 3: Maritime Domain Awareness

Moderator: Jeff Byers

Dr. Jeff Byers received his PhD from UC Santa Barbara in 1994 in Theoretical Physics and has been at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC  since 1999.  His current interests are in applications of Bayesian Inference, Information Theory and Machine Learning to various scientific and military-related data processing problems.

Session 1: Cyber Security

Moderator: Ralph Crosby

Dr. Ralph Crosby is a research scientist at NIWC Atlantic working on applications of machine learning to multiple domains including cybersecurity, signal processing, and recommender systems. Dr. Crosby holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. His research was focused on high performance algorithms for the implementation of statistical models. He also holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Fordham University in New York and a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University.

Session 2: Reinforcement Learning

Moderator: John Emanuello

Dr. John A. Emanuello is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Security Agency’s Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research. He earned a Ph.D. in Pure Mathematics from Florida State university in 2015, with a concentration in Complex Analysis. Since joining the NSA, his research interests have shifted towards the intersection of mathematics, AI/ML, and cybersecurity. He also directs research initiatives in this space. Dr. Emanuello has also organized numerous workshops and seminars at NSA, specifically designed to facilitate meaningful exchanges between communities and enable wider impact of scientific results in AI/ML.

Session 3: Warfighter Interactions With Technology - The Untold Stories (Panel)

Moderator: Brittany Abrams

Mrs. Brittany Abrams is a Lead Human Factors Engineer at NIWC Pacific, where she has worked since 2019. She holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Central Florida, a MS in Human Factors and Systems, and a MS in Unmanned Systems from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. In her time at NIWC Pacific, she has supported projects through the User-Centered Design process to improve hardware and software ergonomics. Her most recent efforts dive into Big Data collection with a focus on robotics. Her primary focus is user research and interaction design geared to create successful solutions for the Warfighter.

Session 1: Computer Vision

Moderator: Dr. Josh Harguess

Dr. Josh Harguess recently joined the AI and Autonomy Innovation Center at MITRE Labs where he leads the Joint AI Center (JAIC) AI Red Team and performs research in AI assurance and various computer vision projects. Previous to MITRE, he spent 1 year at Shield AI performing applied research on computer vision for a quadrotor platform and 7 years at Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific applying computer vision and machine learning research to Navy and DoD problems. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 2011. He is an active researcher in these areas with 50+ publications, 3 best paper awards, and 5 patents. He is also an active member and volunteer for IEEE (AIPR, WACV, CVPR, ACCV, ICCV) and SPIE. 

Session 2: Radio Frequency Machine Learning

Moderator: Dr. Andrew Christianson

Dr. Andrew Christianson joined the Expeditionary Electronic Warfare division at Naval Surface Warfare Center – Crane following completion of his Ph.D. at Purdue University.  His research at Purdue focused on passive intermodulation generated in filters, cables, connectors and antennas.  Among other things, he studied effects such as thermally varying resistance and its contribution to intermodulation generation.  Initially at Crane, his work focused on exploitation of threat devices for counter radio-controlled improvised explosive device electronic warfare (CREW).  He became the founding leader of NSWC-Crane’s Electronic Warfare Advanced Concepts Group in 2017.  In this capacity he has worked extensively on data labeling, algorithm evaluation, and demonstration planning for the DARPA Radio Frequency Machine Learning Systems (RFMLS) program and will be the Co-PI of the ONR SLQ-32 Signal Identification Improvement (SI2) Future Naval Capability (FNC) which plans to incorporate Machine Learning technology into the SLQ-32 processing system.   He has also investigated ways to use EW systems cooperatively to provide additional situational awareness to warfighters through several ONR and DARPA led programs.

Session 3: Neuromorphic Computing

Moderator: Riley Zeller-Townson

Riley Zeller-Townson joined NIWC Pacific as an engineer in 2018, after completing his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology through the SMART fellowship program.  His research covers neuromorphic engineering, experimental wargaming, and the Naval applications of radio frequency machine learning.

Session 1: Data Strategy

Moderator: Nathan Hagan

Nathan Hagan serves as the Digital Strategy lead for the Naval Surface Warfare Centers HQ under the staff of the Chief Engineer.  He graduated from Webb Institute, with a Bachelor’s of Science in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and from the Naval Postgraduate School, with a Master’s in Systems Engineering. With over 8 years of experience within the Naval Surface Warfare Centers, Nathan serves as a subject matter expert in applied systems engineering, software development, and data analytics. In his current role he facilitates cross-enterprise investment of R&D efforts to support the implementation of the Department of Navy (DON) Digital Engineering Strategy, leads the DON Data Community of Practice and is a contributor to NAVSEA and DON Digital Engineering and Data Analytics strategic planning, policy and program execution.

Session 2: Natural Language Processing

Moderator: Dr. Luke A. Overbey

Dr. Overbey is the Science and Technology (S&T) Lead for Data Science and Analytics at the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic. Currently, he is also the lead for the NIWC Atlantic Autonomous Vessels C4ISR Strategic Investment Area (SIA). He has focused on a broad range of research and development in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, including current research in natural language processing, computer vision, assisted decison-making, social network analysis, graph theory, and data aggregation. He has acted as principal investigator or technical lead for over 25 data science focused research projects and authored or co-authored more than 40 scientific publications. He is the founder of the annual Naval Research and Development Enterprise (NRDE) Data Science and Analytics (DSA) Workshop, which began in 2018. Dr. Overbey holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering from the University of California-San Diego, where he researched applied methods of machine learning, time series analysis, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and statistical pattern recognition.

Session 3: Predictive Analytics

Moderator: Robert Liu

Session 1: Learning Methods

Moderator: Dr. Nathan VanHoudnos

Dr. Nathan VanHoudnos (van-HOD-ness) is a Senior Machine Learning Research Scientist at the Emerging Technology Center of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is primarily interested in helping to develop the field of AI Engineering from its current ad hoc, wild west state, to a field with defined and repeatable processes that can be optimized. His current research focuses on training neural networks to be robust to post-training evasion attacks, and more generally, to verifying that a given neural network conforms to a defined set of security properties

Session 2: Biomedical Data

Moderator: CDR Niels Olson

CDR Niels Olson is a board-certified pathologist and the Chief Medical Officer of the Defense Innovation Unit in Mountain View, California. His previous duty stations include Laboratory Medical Director at Naval Hospital Guam, staff pathologist at Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, and General Medical Officer for Surface Forces Pacific. He completed AP/CP residency at Naval Medical Center San Diego. His undergraduate degree is in Physics and prior to medical school he served 7 years as a Surface Warfare Officer in the US Navy. He oversees research programs in machine learning for a broad spectrum of anatomic pathology applications, augmented reality microscopy, artificial intelligence applications in radiology, and distributed sensors in austere environments.

Session 3: Working with Government (Panel)

Moderator: TBD

Session 1: Modeling of Physical Phenomena

Moderator: Jennifer Williams

Dr. Williams is a Lead Computer Scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Keyport (NUWC Keyport). She always had a strong interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning and has been working in this field for 10+ years. She received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computational Mathematics in 2011, followed by her Ph.D. in Computer Science focusing on Artificial Intelligence in 2017 from Washington State University. Dr. Williams is currently the Deputy Department Technology Officer for the Undersea Systems Sustainment Engineering Department. She is a subject matter expert and point of contact for Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Data Science at NUWC Keyport. Dr. Williams is also the lead of the NUWC Keyport Data Science Community of Interest. Prior to her current position, Dr. Williams worked in the Obsolescence Management division as the Research Lead focusing on data science and machine learning based research projects. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, smart environments, adversarial machine learning, and explainable AI. 

Session 2: Navy Applications

Moderator: Mark Dalton

Session 3: Robustness and Safety

Moderator: Bruce Nagy

Bruce Nagy is a Senior Scientist and Systems Engineer at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division at China Lake. His research focuses on advanced game theory techniques, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications as applied to naval weapon systems and tactical decision aids. Nagy received an BS in Biology and BA in Mathematics from the Citadel. He went on to receive an BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School.  He continued his neural network interest with post graduate work in modeling brain stem activities to muscle fibers at UCLA, in cooperation with NIH. Nagy is a former Engineering Duty Officer.