The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has appointed Victoria Coleman, an expert in artificial intelligence and microelectronics, as director of the agency, SpaceNews reported on Monday.
“During this era of great power competition, DARPA is critical to strengthening the U.S. military’s technological dominance and advancing innovations that benefit our warfighters,” said Michael Kratsios, acting under secretary of defense for Research and Engineering, and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient. “We are excited to welcome Dr. Coleman as the new director and look forward to building upon DARPA’s unmatched record of achievement.”
Coleman served as a founding member of DARPA’s Microsystems Exploratory Council and a member of the Defense Science Board. She will bring her extensive private sector experience, across various senior leadership positions, to DARPA.
Coleman currently serves as the senior advisor to the director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley. Before joining CITRIS, she served as CEO of Atlas AI, a public benefit corporation bringing world class AI solutions to sustainable development.
Prior to Atlas AI, Coleman was the chief technology officer (CTO) of the Wikimedia Foundation, where she was responsible for the technology infrastructure of Wikipedia. Throughout her career, Coleman has also been senior vice president at Technicolor where she served as the CTO of the Connected Home Business.
Coleman was also the senior vice president of research and development (R&D) for Harman’s Infotainment Division. As vice president Engineering at Yahoo, Coleman was responsible for membership services, presentation layer technologies and developer relations.
During her tenure with Nokia, as vice president of Emerging Platforms, Coleman led a multi-disciplinary team that developed strategic products including the Nokia Z Launcher and the Nokia X line of smartphones.
As vice president of Software Engineering at Hewlett-Packard (HP), she led the webOS Platform team and built the HP Touchpad. With Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology, Coleman was in charge of the Computer Science Laboratory, where she initiated the development of Tizen and the Samsung Knox line of smartphones.
Coleman was previously Intel’s director for Security Initiatives and the director of the Trust and Manageability Laboratory in Intel’s Corporate Technology Group. Coleman joined SRI International in 1998 after 10 years as a tenured professor in the University of London. Coleman became the founding director of SRI’s System Design Laboratory in 1999.
She is a member of the Defense Science Board, a member of Lockheed Martin’s Technology Advisory Group and a member of Santa Clara University’s Advisory Board for the Department of Computer Engineering. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science.
