Federal Funding Agency Information Panel / Meet and Greet
Time: Monday, February 5, 10:00 – 11:00 AM
Moderators: James Donlon (National Science Foundation), Reid Simmons (National Science Foundation)
Panelists: Jeff Alstott (IARPA), Liyi Dai (ARO), Peter Friedland (AFRL/AFOSR), Jennifer Roberts (DARPA)
Program officers from federal agencies, including NSF, DARPA, IARPA, ARO, and AFRL/AFOSR will present information on current and anticipated funding opportunities relevant to the AI community. Afterwards, stay for informal discussion with these representatives.
Jeff Alstott
IARPA
Dr. Jeff Alstott is a program manager at IARPA. He previously worked for MIT, Singapore University of Technology and Design, the World Bank and the University of Chicago. He obtained his PhD studying complex networks at the University of Cambridge, and his MBA and bachelor’s degrees from Indiana University. He has published research in such areas as animal behavior, computational neuroscience, complex networks, design science, statistical methods, and S&T forecasting.
Liyi Dai
Army Research Office
Liyi Dai is a program manager at the Army Research Office and manages the Intelligent Systems Program and the Information Processing and Fusion Program. The two programs jointly covers research areas such as machine intelligence, advanced learning theory, computer vision, robotics, information fusion, human-machine interfaces, and big data analytics.
Peter Friedland
Independent Technology Strategist
Peter Friedland’s career has focused on interdisciplinary technology research, development, and application with substantial accomplishments in academia, industry, and government. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1980 for pioneering artificial intelligence research in the areas of planning, knowledge representation, and expert systems. He applied this work to the then emerging discipline of molecular genetics leading to the creation of a user community of several thousand academic and industrial scientists, and the funding of a NIH-sponsored National Research Resource, BIONET. He also co-founded two companies while at Stanford: IntelliGenetics, the first bioinformatics company, and Teknowledge, the first expert systems technology and training company. In 1987, Dr. Friedland joined NASA Ames Research Center to create what became the government’s largest and most highly-regarded Intelligent Systems R&D laboratory. He left Ames in 1995 to form and lead his third company, Intraspect Software, an early knowledge management systems provider, to the point of 200 employees and over $30M in sales. Intraspect was sold to Vignette Software in 2003, and Dr. Friedland rejoined Ames as Chief Technologist where he supervised a wide range of technology development activities in emerging areas like nanotechnology. He also chaired several NASA-wide committees and studies in such areas as core competencies for NASA Centers and technology transition from basic research to fielded applications. He is now an independent technology strategist and consultant with a majority of his time spent as a scientific advisor to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). His specific areas of emphasis for AFOSR are strategy and tactics for international research investments in all disciplines, and creation of new programs in computer and cognitive science. Dr. Friedland is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, and a recipient of the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and the Feigenbaum International Medal for Expert Systems Applications.
Jennifer Roberts
DARPA
Dr. Jennifer Roberts joined DARPA as a program manager in 2015. Her principal research interests include scalable analytics and machine learning algorithms that yield insights to human users. Applications of interest include cyber, genetics and human cognition. Dr. Roberts leads three programs in the areas of automated discovery and design, probabilistic programming and cyber.
Reid Simmons
Carnegie Mellon University
Reid Simmons is Research Professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently on leave as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He earned his MS and PhD degrees from MIT in the field of Artificial Intelligence. His current research focuses on reliable autonomous robots, human-robot social interaction, coordination of multiple heterogeneous robots, robotic assembly, robot navigation, and probabilistic planning and reasoning. At NSF, Dr. Simmons is lead Program Director for the National Robotics Initiative and Smart and Autonomous Systems programs.