Doermann Joins DARPA as Program Manager

David Doermann, a senior research scientist in UMIACS, recently joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a program manager in its Information Innovation Office.

Doermann’s research over the past 20 years has focused on expertise in document image understanding. His vision is to expand the government’s capabilities in joint vision/language interaction for triage, and to develop next-generation forensic media technologies.

Since joining DARPA, Doermann has taken over two existing programs. The RATS program addresses the need to provide technologies to process very noisy and degraded speech signals. The challenges include robust speech activity detection, speaker ID, language ID, and keyword search. The MADCAT program is a transition effort focused on getting optical character recognition and machine translation capabilities in the hands of military users in key areas of the world.

DARPA hires program managers for their expertise in areas that they hope will lead to breakthrough technologies essential for national security. Program managers typically serve for three to five years and develop, propose, administer and transition programs by providing vision and leadership to corporate and academic researchers.