The finalists for WashingtonExec’s 2023 Pinnacle Awards were announced Sept. 25, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person Nov. 16.
Next is Tifani O’Brien, vice president and AI/ML accelerator lead at Leidos, who’s the Artificial Intelligence Executive of the Year, Public Company, finalist. Here, O’Brien shares proud Leidos moments and how she’s helping to shape the next generation of leaders.
What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?
Growing a cross-enterprise capability in AIML.
In my previous role, I led a team of AI/ML research scientists creating prototypes for problems in cyber, health, and intelligence. Demonstrating in a lab environment and running evaluations was interesting and the technology was exciting.
However, it became real when I was able to join and then lead a new team applying AI/ML expertise across the enterprise on real data and with impact on executing missions. Actually executing on the goal of applying these technologies on many different projects, domains and data turns out to involve lots of challenges ⏤ from interacting with a different organizational culture that may view the technology itself as a threat to the technical challenges of working on constrained computing platforms with sensitive data and on a tight timeline.
For example, I worked on a project to infer missing information about the electrical grid from smart meter data in one time period and a different project to predict outages in critical IT operations services such as email in another. I was proud of adding a capability to better detect manipulated images and video using machine learning model, in an application processing large amounts of data at scale.
But I have been most proud of leading and growing our team of AI scientists to be representative of a real diversity of backgrounds, culture, experiences, and technical skills, and proud of the way they include many others from the wider community in coming up with solutions to these important challenges.
How do you help shape the next generation of government leaders/industry leaders?
Demonstrate ethical behavior and invite and respect views from all sources.
Foremost, I believe it is our responsibility as current leaders to demonstrate ethical behavior. Consistent ethical behavior leads to trust from above and below in the organization and encourages potential leaders to learn to speak up when they have concerns and have confidence they will be listened to.
It is also important to invite and respect views from across one’s team and organization. This enables junior employees to practice interacting with others professionally, both critically and constructively.
Finally, providing potential leaders with both the authority and responsibility of new tasks that stretch them beyond their current skills gives them the opportunity to learn how to grow and how to ask for help. These skills will be critical as they move into new positions and take on leadership roles, to build good relationships with their teams and their peers.