Program Manager
Information Innovation Office
Susmit Jha, Ph.D., joined DARPA’s Information Innovation Office in August 2025 as a program manager.
His research seeks to advance trustworthy and steerable generative AI and controllable multi-agent systems, with an emphasis on real-world resilience, long-term sustainment, and adversarial robustness to effectively deploy AI in rapidly evolving and dynamic environments, supporting multi-domain defense operations.
Before joining DARPA, Jha was a technical director at SRI International, where he led research in trustworthy, robust, and interpretable AI. He served on the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group (2023–2025). Previously, he led research efforts focused on trustworthy and creative AI at Intel and the United Technology Research Center (now Raytheon) at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). At SRI, he spearheaded multiple AI research programs funded by agencies including DARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Jha’s research has been recognized with several best paper awards and nominations, and his work on program synthesis was recognized with the 10-Year Most Influential Paper Award at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2020.
He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in venues such as NeurIPS, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI), the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), and the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), with over 5000 citations. He is also the co‑founder of P‑1.ai, a venture building artificial general engineering intelligence.
His Ph.D. thesis was on structurally constrained program synthesis bridging inductive machine learning and deductive formal methods and he received the Leon O. Chua Award.
Education
- Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
- M.S., Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
- B.Tech, Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India