SDL Government(SDLGov), based in Herndon, has announced the appointments of four new members to its board of directors.
“We are extremely pleased to welcome Vice Admiral (Ret.) Thomas Wilson, Dr. John Gannon, Ms. Barbara McNamara and Dr. Daniel Marcu to SDL Government’s board of directors,” said Melchior Baltazar, SDL Government’s board chairman and CEO. “VADM Wilson, Dr. Gannon and Ms. McNamara have provided exceptional service to the United States of America, and possess a detailed understanding of the policy drivers in the Department of Defense and National Security space. Their involvement will help SDL Government apply its proven commercial translation solutions to the needs of government agencies. Dr. Marcu’s scientific accomplishments as one of the founders of modern statistical machine translation are well-known, and he continues to be a thought leader in this space.”
The new board, made up of government, business and science leaders from the Department of Defense, national security and language translation industries, will help guide SDL Government as it innovates new solutions to the Big Language challenges facing government agencies today, the company said.
SDL Government is a technology and services company that provides language translation and strategic communications solutions deployed by government organizations worldwide.
“The need has never been greater for government agencies to capture and make sense of massive volumes of big data,” said Wilson. “I am excited to find in SDL Government an organization that understands the mission, and has the knowledge to transform Big Data and Big Language into meaningful insights for our intelligence agencies.”
Wilson served for nearly 34 years in the U.S. Navy, with his last position as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a combat support agency. In that position, he served concurrently as manager of the General Defense Intelligence Program, overseeing the planning, programming and budgeting functions for military service and combatant command intelligence centers and staff. He also served as director of intelligence for the U.S. Atlantic Command; vice director for Intelligence, the Joint Staff; associate director of Central Intelligence for Military Support; and director for Intelligence, the Joint Staff. Among his many awards, Wilson received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Distinguished Service Medal and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. After retiring from the US Navy, Wilson worked with Alliant Techsystems, Inc., eventually serving as president of the ATK Precision Systems Group.
Gannon has served in the most senior analytical positions at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and in the Intelligence Community, including deputy director for Intelligence at the CIA, chairman of the National Intelligence Council and the first assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production. He headed the White House team on Intelligence for the Transition Planning Office for the Department of Homeland Security, and was the first staff director of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security. After leaving government service in 2005, he established the Global Analysis business area at BAE Systems, Inc., where he eventually became the first president of the Intelligence and Security Sector.
Gannon’s awards and medals include the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. President George W. Bush awarded him the National Security Medal, the nation’s highest intelligence award. He is a founding member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group and serves on the Board of Engineering and Physical Sciences of the National Academies of Science. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
McNamara reached the highest civilian position at the National Security Agency (NSA) when she was named the agency’s deputy director, becoming the second woman to attain the position. Beginning her 40-year career at the NSA as a Chinese linguist, McNamara held a variety of management and leadership positions, culminating with her appointment as deputy director. McNamara has overseen the entire intelligence production process from acquiring original source material through the technical processing of the data to the production of material that personnel provide to agency customers.
Her awards include the Intelligence community’s highest award, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. Since retiring from government service, McNamara has served on a number of corporate boards, including CACI, Detica (acquired by BAE Systems), MorphoTrust and SignalScape.
Marcu is the Chief Science Officer of SDL plc and has more than 30 patents awarded or pending in the field of Natural Language Processing. He has authored an MIT Press book, “The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization”, and more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
“SDL Government has already proven their value by bringing to government the market leading technology and solutions for on-premise secure language solutions,” said Marcu. “I look forward to collaborating with SDLGov’s management team as they introduce more innovations to help government agencies with their translation requirements.”
Marcu’s most influential publications address machine translation, discourse parsing, natural language generation and text summarization, receiving best paper awards for his work on Statistical Machine Translation and Summarization at ACL and AAAI. He has acted as principal or co-principal investigator for more than 30 research projects sponsored by government agencies. In 2002, Marcu co-founded Language Weaver. In 2013, he was nominated by the European Patent Office for the European Inventor Award and was named by the Golden Bridge Awards as the R&D Professional of the Year.
