THE NATIONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH RESOURCE TASK FORCE (NAIRRTF)

Tess DeBlanc-Knowles is a Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, contributing to NAIIO’s efforts to maintain U.S. leadership in AI research and development and deepen international engagement. Prior to joining NAIIO, she served as a Director of Research and Analysis at the National Security Commission on AI, was Chief of Staff of the Atlantic Council, and spent time at U.S. Special Operations Command. She is on detail to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Manish Parashar is Office Director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where he oversees investments in national cyberinfrastructure. Dr. Parashar also serves as Co-Chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem. Dr. Parashar served as Assistant Director for Strategic Computing at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2020 where he led strategic planning for the Nation’s Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem, and the development of the report “Pioneering the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem: A Strategic Plan.” Dr. Parashar is on assignment to NSF from the University of Utah where he is the Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Chair in Computational Science and Engineering, and Professor in the School of Computing. Manish is Fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.

Dr. Lynne Parker was the Founding Director of the National AI Initiative Office from its inception in January 2021 until August 2022. She also served as the Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer and the Assistant Director of Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). She served in OSTP from 2018-2022 and played an integral role in numerous landmark national AI policies. Dr. Parker was on assignment to OSTP from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), where she has since returned to the role of associate vice chancellor and director of the new AI Tennessee Initiative. She served as National Science Foundation’s Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems in 2015-2016, and as a Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory prior to joining UTK. She earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, IEEE, and a Distinguished Member of ACM.

Dr. Erwin Gianchandani is the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships. Gianchandani has served in various roles at NSF over the past decade. He was Deputy Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) for six years, and twice served as its Acting Assistant Director. Gianchandani’s leadership and management of CISE included the formulation and implementation of the directorate’s $1 billion annual budget, strategic and human capital planning, and oversight of day-to-day operations comprising a team of over 130 people. With colleagues across NSF, he led the development and launch of several new initiatives, including the Smart and Connected Communities program, Civic Innovation Challenge, Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research, and the National AI Research Institutes. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has published extensively in computational systems biology.

Dr. Daniela Braga is the founder and CEO of DefinedCrowd, one of the fastest growing scale-ups in the AI space. With two decades of experience across research, industry and entrepreneurship, and a hybrid background that spans from linguistics to engineering to AI, Dr. Braga is a citizen of the world and one of the global leaders of crowdsourcing adoption in large enterprises. Previously at Microsoft, Dr. Braga worked across all stacks of speech technology, shipped 26 languages for Exchange 14, 10 TTS voices in Windows 8 and was involved in Cortana. At Voicebox Technologies, she created the data science team, introduced crowdsourcing for big data solutions and re-structured the engineering infrastructure. Dr. Braga is oftentimes a guest lecturer in the University of Washington and is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and several patents. As founder and CEO of DefinedCrowd, Dr. Braga has raised more than $63 million USD, including the largest ever Series B by a female-founded AI company in the US.

Dr. Mark E Dean is professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). His research focus was in advanced computer architecture (neuromorphic computing). Prior to joining UTK, Dr. Dean had a 34-year career in the computer industry working in various executive, research, and development positions at IBM. He served as an IBM Fellow, Chief Technology Officer of the Middle East and Africa, and VP World Wide Strategy and Operations for IBM Research. Dr. Dean holds three of the nine patents for the original IBM PC and created the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA), which permitted add-on devices like the keyboard, disk drives and printers to be connected to the motherboard, earning him election to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Dean has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.

Dr. Oren Etzioni has served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) since its inception in 2014. He is Professor Emeritus, University of Washington and a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group since 2000. He has garnered several awards, including Seattle’s Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert Engelmore Memorial Award (2007), the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (2005), AAAI Fellow (2003), and a National Young Investigator Award (1993). He has been the founder/co-founder of several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013). He has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Nature, Wired, and the MIT Technology Review. He helped pioneer meta-search (1994), online comparison shopping (1996), machine reading (2006), and Open Information Extraction (2007). He has authored over 100 technical papers that have garnered over 2,000 highly influential citations on Semantic Scholar. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 1991 and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.

Dr. Julia Lane is a professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and co-founder of the Coleridge Initiative. Dr. Lane is an economist and statistician who has been actively involved in the management and linkage of federal, state, and local data as well as producing new data products. She has been involved in founding many successful and accessible data analysis platforms, including the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer–Household Dynamics program, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s PatentView, the integrated data infrastructure for Statistics New Zealand, the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, and the Coleridge Initiative’s Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF). She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute. Her most recent book is Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto, published by MIT Press.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Denning Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). Her research includes cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI+healthcare. Before co-founding HAI, she served as Director of Stanford’s AI Lab. During her Stanford sabbatical from 2017 – 2018, Dr. Li was a Vice President at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Prior to joining Stanford, she was on faculty at Princeton University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Li is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL, which is increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, among other distinctions. She holds a B.A. degree in physics from Princeton with High Honors, and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Andrew W. Moore is a distinguished computer scientist with expertise in machine learning and robotics. He became the Head of Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence division in January 2019. Dr. Moore previously worked at Google from 2006 to 2014 and was the founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh engineering office in 2006. He then spent a four-year hiatus at Carnegie Mellon University as the dean of the School of Computer Science. Dr. Moore’s research interests encompass the field of “big data” — applying statistical methods and mathematical formulas to massive quantities of information, ranging from web searches to astronomy to medical records, in order to identify patterns and extract meaning from that information. His past research has included improving the ability of robots and other automated systems to sense the world around them and respond appropriately.

Dr. Michael L. Norman is a distinguished professor of physics at University of California, San Diego and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Dr. Norman is a globally recognized astrophysicist who pioneered the use of high performance computing (HPC) to explore the universe and its beginnings. At SDSC Dr. Norman is Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded CloudBank project, which facilitates the use of public clouds for academic research and education, as well as Expanse, a 5 petaflop HPC resource. Dr. Norman is the author of over 300 research articles in diverse areas of astrophysics, including star and galaxy formation, the evolution of intergalactic medium, as well as numerical methods. Dr. Norman’s work has earned him numerous honors, including Germany’s prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Physical Society. He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in engineering and applied sciences from University of California, Davis.

Dr. Dan Stanzione is the Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Stanzione is a nationally recognized leader in high performance computing. He is the principal investigator (PI) for the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant which deployed Frontera, the fastest supercomputer at a U.S. university. He has been involved in a number of other large cyberinfrastructure and software efforts, including serving for six years as the co-director of CyVerse, a large-scale NSF life sciences environment, and DesignSafe, a platform for Natural Hazards Engineering Research data and computing. Prior to coming to TACC, Dr. Stanzione led the High Performance Computing Initiative at Arizona State University, and was an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow in Washington, D.C. Dr. Stanzione received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and his master’s degree and doctorate in computer engineering from Clemson University.

Dr. Fred Streitz is the Chief Computational Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, currently on detail as Senior Advisor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he is helping architect and build out computational and analytical capabilities in support of a new center. He previously served as the chief science advisor for the Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office (AITO) in the Department of Energy, where he provided technical assistance on the planning, development, and execution of strategies for advancing and adopting AI and related technologies agency-wide. Dr. Streitz is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a two-time winner of the IEEE Gordon Bell Prize for outstanding achievement in high performance computing. He earned a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Elham Tabassi is the Chief of Staff in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She leads the NIST Trustworthy AI program that aims to cultivate trust in the design, development, and use of AI technologies by improving measurement science, standards, and related tools in ways that enhance economic security and improve quality of life. She has been working on various machine learning and computer vision research projects with applications in biometrics evaluation and standards since she joined NIST in 1999. She is the principal architect of NIST Fingerprint Image Quality (NFIQ) which is now an international standard for measuring fingerprint image quality and has been deployed in many large-scale biometric applications worldwide. She is a senior member of IEEE, and a fellow of Washington Academy of Sciences.