Defense Readiness Workshop

Dr. George Duchak is the Chief Information Officer for the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). He was previously the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for Command, Control, Communications, Cyber & Business Systems (C3CB). Prior to becoming a DASD, he was the founding Director of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) in Mountain View, CA, where he served as a conduit between leading edge Silicon Valley innovators and the Department of Defense. Prior to that, he led the Air Force's and nation's premier research organization for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) and cyber technologies as the Director of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate, Rome, NY. There, he was selected as the Federal Laboratory Director of the Year from over 300 federal lab directors. He is also a former DARPA Program Manager where he conceived of, developed, and transitioned to the services a portfolio of programs in the broad area of C4I and Cyber. He was a private sector entrepreneur and businessman with more than a decade of private industry experience starting several companies that served the US Government by providing technical consultancy or product. His private sector experience was software product focused principally in the area of intelligence exploitation using crowd sourcing techniques, big data analytics and cloud services well before industry in general and DoD began to move in this direction. Finally, and most importantly, he is a retired naval officer.

Dr. Duchak is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, The Ohio State University, George Mason University and University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business earning degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Avionics, Aeronautical Engineering, Public Policy, and Business Administration. He completed the Program Management Course at the Defense Acquisition University and is a certified level 1 in Program Management as well as Systems Engineering, and level 2 in Test & Evaluation and Budgeting. He is a licensed Professional Engineer and has completed the Carnegie Mellon University Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) course and Harvard’s Information Security course. He is a senior fellow Auburn University’s McCrary Center for Cyber Security, a member of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance Cyber Security Committee, and a current board member of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Cybersecurity Subcommittee. Dr. Duchak is married to Sonya Milley, Esq., an attorney, and they have two grown children, Alexander and Tatiana.

Dr. Matt Turek joined DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) as a program manager in July 2018. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and their application to problems with significant societal impact.

Prior to his position at DARPA, Turek was at Kitware, Inc., where he led a team developing computer vision technologies. His research focused on multiple areas, including large scale behavior recognition and modeling; object detection and tracking; activity recognition; normalcy modeling and anomaly detection; and image indexing and retrieval. Turek has made significant contributions to multiple DARPA and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) efforts and has transitioned large scale systems for operational use. Before joining Kitware, Turek worked for GE Global Research, conducting research in medical imaging and industrial inspection.

Turek holds a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Marquette University, and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Clarkson University. His doctoral work focused on combinatorial optimization techniques for computer vision problems. Turek is a co-inventor on 14 patents and co-author of multiple publications, primarily in computer vision.

Joe Becker is the VP of Customer success at Uptake, focused on the company’s transportation and federal business. He serves as the conduit between Uptake’s internal teams and stakeholders at both the U.S. Army and UCMC, ensuring that each customer and user is achieving the desired outcomes while using Uptake products. Joe has been with Uptake since 2015, serving various leadership roles within the company, from product development to pre-sales engineering. Regardless of his role at Uptake, Joe is committed to developing products that meet technical requirements, exceed partner expectations, delight users, and ultimately deliver tremendous value. A passionate entrepreneur and trained mechanical engineer, Joe leverages deep technical expertise gained by spending over a decade managing the people, process, and outcomes of large-scale infrastructure projects around the globe.

Mr. David McKeown serves as the Deputy DoD Chief Information Officer for Cybersecurity (DCIO(CS)) and the DoD’s Senior Information Security Officer (SISO) per 44 USC 3544. In this role he provides expert policy, technical, program, and defense-wide oversight support to the DoD CIO on all cybersecurity matters. He is responsible for leading the DoD-wide cybersecurity program and associated governance processes. He partners with industry to improve cybersecurity and information sharing through the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and represents the Secretary of Defense and DoD CIO in international discussions and negotiates cybersecurity topics in both bilateral and multi-lateral (alliance and coalition) channels. He leads the development of the cybersecurity investment priorities for the Department and provides planning guidance to Components.

Mr. McKeown has over 33 years’ of experience in the Department of Defense having served 27 years in the Air Force and 6 years as a government civilian. He spent 21 years as an Air Force Cyberspace Operations officer skillfully leading numerous organizations and high-visibility initiatives to include the Air Force Cybersecurity Program as a member of the Air Staff.

He served as the Director of Enterprise Information and Mission Assurance for the United States Army Information Technology Agency and as the Cybersecurity Center Chief and Enterprise Services Center Chief for the DISA Joint Service Provider in the Pentagon. He led the Pentagon Computer Incident Response Team (PENTCIRT) providing twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week network security monitoring and intrusion detection, attack sensing and warning, and incident response and handling for the Department of Defense's key leadership and staffs.

Mr. McKeown most recently led the Department of Justice’s Service Delivery Staff where he was responsible for the acquisition, development, deployment, operations, and maintenance of Department IT as well as delivery of high quality, customer-centric services to ensure the success of the DOJ and its component organizations.

Rand Waldron is Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Product Development. He is responsible for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Global Government Sector team and leading the strategy, development and deployment of Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud @ Customer product line. Waldron is focused on ensuring that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure fulfills the unique needs of customers who require complete cloud solutions on their terms: in the premises of their choosing, or meeting government security and process requirements—often disconnected from the internet—without compromising innovation, existing investments and future growth.

Waldron joined Oracle in 2018. Prior to joining Oracle, he was Deputy Assistant Director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, responsible for the FBI’s enterprise software and data—including investigative and intelligence analytics, records and evidence management, large scale custom software development, and business operations systems. Throughout his career at the FBI, Waldron was responsible for the delivery of many of the Bureau’s most critical systems. He helped drive the FBI’s migration to cloud and he has a unique track record in harnessing technology’s power to enable the national security mission.

Prior to the FBI, Waldron served at the United States Department of Justice. Before his government service, Mr. Waldron founded a startup in the defense sector and was Director of Technology at a venture capital-funded technology company in California.

Sam Richman is a Senior Strategic Solution Architect for the USAF at Red Hat. He has over 20 years of enterprise IT experience, both in the Federal service and in multiple industry roles, supporting civilian and DoD agency initiatives such as agile architecture, application delivery, data analytics, and cybersecurity

Nand Mulchandani serves as the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Mulchandani brings more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry as a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in the enterprise infrastructure and security software industries to his service in the government to help transform the Department of Defense in adopting next-generation AI and software technologies.

Prior to government service, Mulchandani was at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and remains a non-resident Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Mulchandani also served as the Vice President of Market Development and Strategy for Citrix, a leading provider of desktop virtualization and networking infrastructure. He joined Citrix through its acquisition of ScaleXtreme, where Mulchandani was the CEO and co-founder. Prior to his tenure at ScaleXtreme, Mulchandani served in various capacities as CEO, co-founder, senior executive, and entrepreneur-in-residence for a number of technology startups and companies including the venture capital firm Accel Partners, OpenDNS (funded by Sequoia Capital and Greylock, acquired by Cisco), VMware, Determina (funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield and USVP, acquired by VMware), and Oblix (funded by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, acquired by Oracle). Mulchandani started his career at Sun Microsystems as a compiler architect and holds a patent on dynamic code generation.

Mulchandani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Mathematics from Cornell University, a Master in Science in Management from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and a Master of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Mr. Pianta is the Director for Cloud Solutions for the National Securities Group at SAP NS2. He has over 25 years of experience with the design, development, and delivery of solutions for both public and private sectors. Breaking down information stovepipes and improving both customer and employee experiences have been a central theme across solutions for the Public sector.

Mr. Pianta brings extensive subject matter expertise (Talent Development, Knowledge Management, Collaboration and eLearning technology) to his current work with the Dept. of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Federal Civilian market. His career spans a broad spectrum of use cases: Marine Corps logistics with a deployment to Somalia, Africa; Commercial Game Development and Government Training & Simulation; Anti-Money Laundering Desktop Fusion; Collaboration and eLearning – architecting, training, and consulting globally; Experience Driven Learning; and now, a focus on the Secure, Intelligent Enterprise.

Mr. Pianta holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from George Mason and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia.

Mr. Les Benito is a GG-15 and currently serves as the Director of Operations for the Cloud Computing Program Office (CCPO) in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Information System Agency, where he leads cloud capability development and delivery, including for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program. In 2020, Mr. Benito served as the C CPO team lead for the rapid, Department-wide deployment of the Commercial Virtual Remote environment in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 health emergency; the largest Microsoft Teams deployment ever, servicing over 1.1 million DoD users.

Prior to this role, Mr. Benito served as the Director of Public Web for the Defense Media Activity. In this role, he ran the Public Web program for DoD, which included 680 of DoD's public websites that are still used as primary communication tools by the Secretary of Defense, military service secretaries, and commanders around the world. With over 4.5 million visitors per week, these DoD sites continue to be some of the most popular government sites on the Internet. Mr. Benito was also DoD representative on the Federal Web Manager's Council, an interagency group of senior federal government web managers who collaborate to share common challenges, ideas, best practices, and ways to improve the online delivery of U.S. Government information and services.