Overview of DARPA Defense Sciences Office

DARPA is the Department of Defense’s central research organization with a mission to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforms them into important, new game-changing technologies for US national security.  Current DSO themes include frontiers, in math, computation, and design, limits of sensing and sensors, complex social systems, and anticipating surprise. DSO relies on the greater scientific research community to help identify and explore ideas that could potentially revolutionize the state-of-the-art. Senator and Zhang will present an overview of DARPA and the Defense Sciences Office, including funding priorities and opportunities, and also discuss DARPA’s “AI Next” Campaign, with an emphasis on development and application of  “third-wave” AI technologies.Ted and Jiangying will be available from 10-11 for brief individual meetings.  If you’d like to meet with them, please contact Michael Pazzani mpazzani@ucsd.edu
BIOS
Dr. Jiangying Zhou
Jiangying Zhou became a DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in November 2018, having served as a program manager in the Strategic Technology Office (STO) since January 2018. Her areas of research include machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) exploitation technologies.
Prior to joining DARPA, Zhou was a senior engineering manager in the Information Sciences Division at Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, LLC. During her more than ten-year tenure at Teledyne, Zhou worked on many contract R&D programs from U.S. government funding agencies as well as commercial customers in the areas of sensor exploitation, signal and image processing, and pattern recognition. Zhou also served as director of R&D of Summus Inc., a small start-up company specializing in contract engineering projects for U.S. Department of Defense and commercial customers in the areas of video and image compression, pattern recognition, and computer vision. Zhou began her career as a scientist at Panasonic Technologies, Inc., Princeton, New Jersey, where she conducted research in the areas of document analysis, handwriting recognition, image analysis, and information retrieval.
Dr. Zhou received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science, both in computer science, from Fudan University. She received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Zhou is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Society and also a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon international honor society for the computing and information disciplines.
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Ted Senator
Mr. Ted Senator joined DARPA as a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in August 2018. Senator was a senior science advisor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, focusing on uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has been a program manager at both the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as the founder and leader of the Artificial Intelligence Division at the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and an engineer for the Department of the Navy. Between periods of government service, he was a technical fellow and vice president at SAIC (now Leidos), the founder of the data science group at NASD Regulation (now the Financial Regulatory Authority, or FinRA), and a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton.
Senator has been developing and researching AI systems and technologies for over 25 years. He formed and led teams that developed and deployed applications of AI in the domains of counter-terrorism, money laundering, and stock market fraud. He also formulated and led research programs in fundamental techniques for applying AI and machine learning to structured and linked data and in transfer learning.
Senator recently retired after 15 years of service as the secretary-treasurer of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), of which he is a senior member. He is a three-time winner of AAAI’s Deployed Application Award, the 2013 recipient of AAAI’s Distinguished Service Award, and the 2014 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD). He received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Exceptional Public Service Medal in 2006 and the Federal Information Technology Leadership Award in 1993. He holds degrees in physics and in electrical engineering from MIT and has done additional graduate studies in physics, information technology, and finance
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