Ellen M. Lord, former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, joins Clarifai's Public Sector Advisory Council

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Jun 18, 2021, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, June 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Clarifai announced that Ellen M. Lord, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, has joined the company as senior advisor and member of its Public Sector Advisory Council. Clarifai is a leading AI provider that specializes in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing and Audio Recognition. Clarifai helps government and defense agencies make sense of their unstructured image, video, text and audio data, transforming it into structured data to increase information and gain knowledge.

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

"Ellen Lord brings a wealth of experience to Clarifai gained over 30 years serving the defense industry, including her most recent tenure leading all matters relating to acquisition for the Department of Defense." said Dr. Matt Zeiler, Clarifai's CEO. "We're humbled by the opportunity to work with Ellen to bring Clarifai's artificial intelligence capabilities to serve the missions of the U.S. Government with state-of-the-art commercial technology."

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 is credited for driving significant policy change focused on simplicity and speed of hardware and software procurement. Prior to 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, as well as 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 MS degree in chemistry from the University of New Hampshire.

"I have been impressed with the breadth and applicability of Clarifai's artificial intelligence technology." said Ellen M. Lord, Former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. "I'm looking forward to collaborating with Clarifai in helping government agencies enhance intelligence, scale operations efficiently and reduce risks."

Earlier in the year, Clarifai created a public sector advisory council with highly experienced senior advisors that are dedicated to fostering the understanding and use of AI by government agencies. The council includes: Lieutenant General Robert P. Ashley, Jr., U.S. Army, Ret., the former Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and Jacqueline Tame, former Acting Deputy Director of the DoD's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. In April, Clarifai added Major General Barbara Fast, U.S. Army, Ret., the first female to command an Army Military Intelligence Tactical Exploitation Battalion and the first female Intelligence Officer/G2 of a combat division.

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 range from recognizing and tracking threats, detecting objects via aerial and satellite imagery, optimizing equipment maintenance, finding victims in disaster zones to enhancing security at U.S. government facilities.

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, facial recognition, visual search and natural language processing. Clarifai offers on-premise, cloud and bare-metal deployments.

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. Clarifai, headquartered in New York City, has raised $40M from top technology investors and is continuing to grow 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