DATAWorks Sessions Archive

Dr. Jade Freeman currently serves as the Associate Branch Chief and a Team Lead at Battlefield Information Systems Branch. In this capacity, Dr. Freeman oversees information systems and engineering research projects and analyses. Prior to joining ARL, Dr. Freeman served as the Senior Statistician at the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, Department of Homeland Security. Throughout the career, her work in operations and research includes cyber threat analyses, large survey design and analyses,  experimental design, survival analysis, and missing data imputation methods.  Dr. Freeman is also a PMP certified project manager, experienced in leading and managing IT development projects. Dr. Freeman obtained a Ph. D. in Statistics from the George Washington University.

John Rogers is a research scientist specializing in autonomous mobile robotics at the Army Research Laboratory’s Intelligent Robotics Branch of the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD). John’s research has focused on autonomy for multi-robot teams as well as distributed multi-robot state estimation. John is currently leading the Tactical Behaviors group in the AI for mobility and maneuver essential research program, which is focused on developing deep learning and game theoretic maneuver for ground robots against adversaries. Prior to this, John led the multi-robot mapping research on the Autonomy Research Pilot Initiative (ARPI) on “autonomous collective defeat of hard and deeply buried targets” in collaboration with his colleagues at the Air Force Research Laboratory. John has also partnered with DCIST, MAST and Robotics CTA partners to extend funded research programs within-house collaborative projects. John completed his Ph.D. degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology in2012 with his advisor, Prof. Henrik Christensen from the Robotics and Intelligent Machines center. While at Georgia Tech, John participated in a variety of sponsored research projects including the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) project from the Army Research Laboratory, a counter-terrorism “red team” project for the Naval Research Laboratory in addition to his thesis research on semantic mapping and reasoning culminating in his thesis “Life-long mapping of objects and places for domestic robots”. Prior to attending Georgia Tech, John completed a M.S. degree in Computer Science at Stanford (2006) while working with Prof. Sebastian Thrun and Prof. Andrew Ng on the DARPA Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) project. John also holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (2002). John has authored or co-authored over 50 scientific publications in Robotics and Computer Vision journals and conferences. John’s current research interests are automatic exploration and mapping of large-scale indoor, outdoor, and subterranean environments, place recognition in austere locations, semantic scene understanding, and probabilistic reasoning for autonomous mobile robots. CV: Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uH_LDocAAAAJ&hl=en

Dr. Sarah Burke is a scientific test and analysis techniques (STAT) Expert for the STAT Center of Excellence. She works with acquisition programs in the Air Force, Army, and Navy to improve test efficiency, plan tests effectively, and analyze the resulting test data to inform decisions on system development. She received her M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University.

Dr. John Haman is a statistician at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he develops methods and tools for analyzing test data. He has worked with a variety of Army, Navy, and Air Force systems, including counter-UAS and electronic warfare systems. Currently, John is supporting the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

Dr. Peter Parker is Team Lead for Advanced Measurement Systems at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. He serves an Agency-wide statistical expert across all of NASA’s mission directorates of Exploration, Aeronautics, and Science to infuse statistical thinking, engineering, and methods. His expertise is in collaboratively integrating research objectives, measurement sciences, modeling and simulation, and test design to produce actionable knowledge that supports rigorous decision-making for aerospace research and development.

Dr. Willis Jensen is a member of the HR Analytics team at W.L. Gore & Associates, where he supports people related analytics work across the company. At Gore, he previously spent 12 years as a statistician and as the Global Statistics Team Leader where he led a team of statisticians that provided statistical support and training across the globe. He holds degrees in Statistics from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Virginia Tech.

Stoney Trent, Ph.D.  Research Professor and Principal Advisor for Research and Innovation, Virginia Tech; Founder, The Bulls Run Group, LLC Stoney is a Cognitive Engineer and Military Intelligence and Cyber Warfare veteran, who specializes in human-centered innovation.  As an Army officer, Stoney designed and secured over $350M to stand up the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) for the Department of Defense.  As the Chief of Missions in the JAIC, Stoney established product lines to deliver human-centered AI to improve warfighting and business functions in the world’s largest bureaucracy.  Previously, he established and directed U.S. Cyber Command’s $50M applied research lab, which develops and assesses products for the Cyber Mission Force.  Stoney has served as a Strategic Policy Research Fellow with the RAND Arroyo Center and is a former Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Science and Leadership at the United States Military Academy.   He has served in combat and stability operations in Iraq, Kosovo, Germany, and Korea.  Stoney is a graduate of the Army War College and former Cyber Fellow at the National Security Agency.

Dr. Jane Pinelis is the Chief of the Test, Evaluation, and Assessment branch at the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). She leads a diverse team of testers and analysts in rigorous test and evaluation (T&E) for JAIC capabilities, as well as development of T&E-specific products and standards that will support testing of AI-enabled systems across the DoD. Prior to joining the JAIC, Dr. Pinelis served as the Director of Test and Evaluation for USDI’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, better known as Project Maven. She directed the developmental testing for the AI models, including computer vision, machine translation, facial recognition and natural language processing. Her team developed metrics at various levels of testing for AI capabilities and provided leadership empirically-based recommendations for model fielding. Additionally, she oversaw operational and human-machine teaming testing, and conducted research and outreach to establish standards in T&E of systems using artificial intelligence. Dr. Pinelis has spent over 10 years working predominantly in the area of defense and national security. She has largely focused on operational test and evaluation, both in support of the service operational testing commands and also at the OSD level. In her previous job as the Test Science Lead at the Institute of Defense Analyses, she managed an interdisciplinary team of scientists supporting the Director and the Chief Scientist of the Department of Operational Test and Evaluation on integration of statistical test design and analysis and data-driven assessments into test and evaluation practice. Before, that, in her assignment at the Marine Corps Operational Test and Evaluation Activity, Dr. Pinelis led the design and analysis of the widely publicized study on the effects of integrating women into combat roles in the Marine Corps. Based on this experience, she co-authored a book, titled “The Experiment of a Lifetime: Doing Science in the Wild for the United States Marine Corps.” In addition to T&E, Dr. Pinelis has several years of experience leading analyses for the DoD in the areas of wargaming, precision medicine, warfighter mental health, nuclear non-proliferation, and military recruiting and manpower planning. Her areas of statistical expertise include design and analysis of experiments, quasi-experiments, and observational studies, causal inference, and propensity score methods. Dr. Pinelis holds a BS in Statistics, Economics, and Mathematics, an MA in Statistics, and a PhD in Statistics, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Rachel is a Research Associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses where she applies rigorous statistics and study design to evaluate, test, and report on various programs. She specializes in human system integration.

Joseph B. Lyons is the Lead for the Collaborative Interfaces and Teaming Core Research Area within the 711 Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. Dr. Lyons received his PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Wright State University in Dayton, OH, in 2005.  Some of Dr. Lyons’ research interests include human-machine trust, interpersonal trust, human factors, and influence. Dr. Lyons has worked for the Air Force Research Laboratory as a civilian researcher since 2005, and between 2011-2013 he served as the Program Officer at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research where he created a basic research portfolio to study both interpersonal and human-machine trust as well as social influence. Dr. Lyons has published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, and is an Associate Editor for the journal Military Psychology. Dr. Lyons is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Military Psychologists.

Chad Bieber is a Senior Research Engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, is currently working as the Test and Evaluation Director for Project Maven, and was previously a Research Staff Member at IDA. A former pilot in the US Air Force, he received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from North Carolina State University. Chad is interested in how humans interact with complex, and increasingly autonomous, systems.

Dr. Poornima Madhavan is a Principal Scientist and Capability Lead for Social and Behavioral Sciences at the MITRE Corporation. She has more than 15 years of experience studying human-systems integration issues in sociotechnical systems including trust calibration, decision making, and risk perception. Dr. Madhavan spent the first decade of her career as a professor of Human Factors Psychology at Old Dominion University where she studied threat detection, risk analysis and human decision making in aviation and border security. This was followed by a stint as the Director of the Board on Human-Systems Integration at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine where she served as the primary spokesperson to the federal government on policy issues related to human-systems integration. Just before joining MITRE, Dr. Madhavan’s work focused on modeling human behavioral effects of non-lethal weapons and human-machine teaming for autonomous systems at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Dr. Madhavan received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed her post-doctoral fellowship in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.