Ryan Gabriele
Senior Vice President of Defense and Intelligence, Parsons Corp.
Ryan Gabriele’s focus over the last two years has been bridging the technology gap between industry and government to deliver transformative, operationally relevant capabilities quickly to the warfighter, specifically within the AI space.
In 2021, Gabriele established Parsons’ Paladin Lab enterprise, a suite of innovation labs across the country with the central hub located at the U.S. Army installation Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Paladin’s mission is to identify, mature, demonstrate, test and field emerging capabilities, with a focus on operationalizing early R&D AI to be both effective and dependable in the field.
The Paladin lab enterprise was instrumental in Parsons’ recent $98.9 million IDEA award, where the company will evaluate and augment commercial AI capabilities as candidates to transition to Army PEOs as well as modernize existing cloud environments to be better suited to support AI development and leverage emerging algorithms quickly.
“Ryan has been instrumental in building a culture of technical excellence at Parsons,” said Mike Kushin, president of defense and intelligence at Parsons. “He created the Solutions, Products, Applied Research and Collaboration (SPARC) organization to matrix together top technical talent from across D&I. SPARC provides integrated and compelling solutions to our largest proposals, as well as oversees our research and development efforts into areas such as applied AI.”
Why Watch
Gabriele and his team are committed to supporting DOD’s mission to create reliable AI systems. They aim to foster trust among program leaders and users. To do this, they’re collaborating with industry leaders to spot new AI trends and offer practical advice to the government. Their goal is to make AI deployment in all battlefields more efficient.
Additionally, the team is building a machine learning operations platform in conjunction with industry partners. This platform, usable across different levels of security, is designed to aid the Army’s mission. They also continue to create unique algorithms that enhance target accuracy and speed up the process from detecting a target to taking action.
“To a soldier, the true value of AI is fully realized when it operates dependably in challenging environments,” Gabriele said. “We’ll never make the transition from commercial AI to operational AI until we prove that these analytics can be reliable when operating on imperfect data feeds, with intermittent communications, on current-generation hardware that’s representative of what users will have in the field. Parsons’ sole focus is on delivering truly operational AI.”