Mark Berman

Mark is a seasoned technology leader with over three decades of experience in advanced research and development.

Mark has served in principal investigator, technical lead, and management oversight roles for R&D efforts on behalf of numerous key research agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the US intelligence community, and the US Navy. His focus on bringing technical innovations into practical use began in the 1980s when he participated in a successful effort to bring new user interface technology and AI-based pattern recognition and rule-based systems to bear on a major sensor and processing system for the US Navy.

Before joining SIFT, Mark was VP for Technology Development at BBN, where he exercised management oversight over numerous research and technology transition efforts, across a diverse set of disciplines. These include distributed computing tools (e.g., Cougaar agent infrastructure), learning systems, and game-based lightweight immersive training. In previous assignments, Mark was responsible for oversight of research projects related to the development of distributed systems middleware. These projects include QuO (Quality Objects) middleware, and distributed geospatial data storage, retrieval, and display mechanisms, based on open distributed system standards.

In the 2010s, Mark was Project Director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) initiative to create a nationwide distributed laboratory for at-scale experimentation in networking, distributed computation, and domain science.

Mark's research interests include design, implementation, and usability of complex distributed computing systems, as well as the federation of research testbeds. A list of his publications is available via Google Scholar. He is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).