Matt Turek

Matt Turek, Ph.D., assumed the role of deputy office director for DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O) in May 2022. In this position, he provides technical leadership and works with program managers to envision, create, and transition capabilities that ensure enduring information advantage for the United States and its allies.

Turek joined DARPA in July 2018 as an I2O program manager, and served as acting deputy director of I2O from June 2021 to October 2021. He previously managed the Media Forensics (MediFor), Semantic Forensics (SemaFor), Machine Common Sense (MCS), and Explainable AI (XAI) programs as well as the Reverse Engineering of Deception (RED) AI Exploration program (AIE). 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.

Education

• Ph.D., Philosophy in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• M.S., Electrical Engineering, Marquette University
• B.S., Electrical Engineering, Clarkson University

Turek's doctoral work focused on combinatorial optimization techniques for computer vision problems. He is a co-inventor on several patents and co-author of multiple publications, primarily in computer vision.