DARPA, the military’s futuristic research lab, got a new director

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military agency that develops the weapons of the future, just got a new director.

Dr. Victoria Coleman, a woman born in Greece, wants to revolutionize how weapon systems and defense technology are developed and lead the American military into the future.

Better artificial intelligence, a more efficient development process, and more advanced technology to the warfighter are just some of the goals Coleman wants to achieve.

“If you can confer a time advantage to our service members through processes, through tools, technologies, through systems that we enable, we give them the gift of time,” said Coleman in an interview to the Air Force Magazine.  

The new director wants DARPA’s lab to be able to produce en masse their creations. To achieve this, Coleman is looking to utilize open-source semiconductor designs, a fairly new concept that Silicon Valley companies have been using to boost their productivity.  

Coleman stated that the ability to innovate in the United States has been significantly hamstrung by bureaucratic processes and has created a sort of technological national emergency.

“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 Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Kratsios in a press release. “We are excited to welcome Dr. Coleman as the new director and look forward to building upon DARPA’s unmatched record of achievement.”

Moreover, Coleman wants to bring academics, companies, and the military closer together.

Coleman has an interesting background. She was born in Greece and immigrated to the States to attend college. She went on to complete numerous degrees and attain senior positions in the tech industry.

She is the third woman to become DARPA’s director. This is her first time working full-time for the government, but she does have some experience with DARPA as she is a founding member of the Agency’s Microsystems Exploratory Council.

To say that Coleman is experienced and knows the tech business is an understatement. Before assuming the directorship, Coleman was a senior advisor on microelectronics technology policy to the director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), University of California, Berkeley; CEO of AI P.B.C, an artificial intelligence startup; and chief technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. She is a former member of the Defense Science Board.

She has held positions in the following tech companies: Technicolor, Harman International, Yahoo!, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, Samsung, Intel, and SRI International.

DARPA has less than 300 employees and a budget of approximately $3.5 billion (it’s worth noting that this is just a fraction of the sum that the Department of Defense invests in research and development every year).

The Agency was established in 1958 and is part of the Department of Defense. Its mission is to “anticipate, explore, and achieve the concepts and technology on which the nation’s future deterrent and defense capabilities depend.” In other words, DARPA creates the weapon systems of tomorrow.

DARPA’s contribution, however, isn’t limited to the military as many of its designs have gone to benefit the broader society. This aspect of DARPA is something that Coleman wants to build on. There is a pilot program that DARPA uses to help startups raise venture capital in the US in order to grow and then contribute either to the military or economy.  

“DARPA is in the business of systematic changemaking, not just about discovering what the new breakthrough might be. It’s also about being there and seeing it over the line,” added Coleman.

DARPA has less than 300 employees and a budget of approximately $3.5 billion (it’s worth noting that this is just a fraction of the sum that the Department of Defense invests in research and development every year).