Clarifai Public Sector Advisory Board Member and Former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Selected to Congressional Commission

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Feb 16, 2022, 10:22 ET

NEW YORK, Feb. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The leaders of the congressional Armed Services Committees announced that one of Clarifai's senior advisors, Ellen M. Lord, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, was nominated by Senator Jim Inhofe – Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee – and named to a Congressionally-mandated, 14-member commission created to review the Pentagon's Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process. The commission aims to examine more efficient alternatives to the process and develop policy recommendations that will enable the Defense Department to rapidly field operational capabilities and outpace America's near-peer competitors.

Ellen M. Lord, former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment

"Reform of the PPBE will enable the Department of Defense to scale operational capabilities by adopting new and impactful technologies like Artificial Intelligence with agility and speed," said Ellen Lord. "This is critical to our country's continued technological leadership."

In addition to serving as one of Clarifai's senior advisors, Ms. Lord currently serves multiple boards and advisories spanning the public, private and non-profit sectors.

As Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, Ellen was accountable to the Secretary of Defense for all matters pertaining to acquisition for the Department of Defense. She drove significant policy changes focused on simplicity and speed of hardware and software procurement. Before this, Ellen was President and CEO of Textron Systems, where she commercialized a broad range of products and services supporting defense, homeland security, aerospace, and infrastructure protection.

Ellen is a former Vice Chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association and a former Director of the U.S. – India Business Council. She has served on the industry steering committee for the Center for New American Security's (CNAS) task force on "Strategy, Technology and the Global Defense Industry," as well as CNAS's DoD-Industry collaborative project "Future Foundry." She has also served on the Board of Trustees of the U.S. Naval Institute Foundation. MS. Lord earned a BA degree in chemistry from Connecticut College and an MS degree in chemistry from the University of New Hampshire.

About Clarifai

Clarifai offers a leading computer vision, NLP, and deep learning AI lifecycle platform for modeling unstructured image, video, text, and audio data. It helps both public sector and enterprise customers solve complex use cases through object classification, detection, tracking, geolocation, visual search, and natural language processing. Clarifai offers on-premise, cloud, bare-metal, and classified deployments.

Clarifai has long served the missions of the U.S. federal government, including the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and Civilian agencies, with state-of-the-art computer vision and natural language processing AI solutions. Its use cases include recognizing and tracking threats, detecting objects via aerial and satellite imagery, optimizing equipment maintenance, finding victims in disaster zones, and enhancing security at U.S. government facilities.

Founded in 2013 by Matt Zeiler, Ph.D., Clarifai has been a market leader in AI since winning the top five places in image classification at the 2013 ImageNet Challenge. In 2019, Clarifai was named a leader in Forrester's New Wave Computer Vision Platforms report, the only startup to receive a differentiated rating. Clarifai is headquartered in Delaware with more than 100 employees and offices in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Tallinn, Estonia. For more information, please visit www.clarifai.com.

Contact: [email protected],
https://www.clarifai.com

SOURCE Clarifai