2017 MILCOM

Dr. Thomas J. Burns
Director, Strategic Technology Office
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)


Dr. Thomas J. Burns is the director of the Strategic Technology Office (STO). As STO director, he is responsible for a diverse portfolio of programs in battle management, command and control; communications and networking; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; electronic warfare; and positioning, navigation and timing. Prior to DARPA, Dr. Burns was founder and managing partner of CXO Capital, where he managed the investment and mentoring of high-tech start-up businesses focused on the development of smart sensing technology for commercial applications. Prior to this, Dr. Burns served as president, SET Subsidiary, and senior vice president and manager of Science Applications International Corporation’s (SAIC) Sensors and Phenomenology Operation. Dr. Burns co-founded and served as CEO of SET Corporation, a small high-tech business specializing in the creation and commercialization of smart sensing technologies. SET made significant advances in RF, full-motion video, and wide-area motion imagery sensing, patenting a number of advanced sensing and data exploitation innovations, and launching a highly successful product that has been deployed throughout the world to detect suicide bombers at stand-off ranges. Prior to founding SET, Dr. Burns co-founded and served as chief operating officer of Object Video, Inc. From 1995-1999, Dr. Burns served as a DARPA program manager, pioneering the development of big data analytics to extract information from massive quantities of multi-sensor data. His work at DARPA built on his experiences directing Computer Vision research as a U.S. Air Force officer at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Dr. Burns received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from The Ohio State University. He received a Master of Science and doctorate in electrical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.

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