Dr. Craig Martell is the Department of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, reporting to the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His appointment as the CDAO brings extensive industry experience and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) expertise to the Department.

As Chair of the CDAO Council, Dr. Martell leads Principal Staff Assistant policy officials and stakeholders in advising Departmental leadership; driving systemic DoD-wide strategy and policy; and advocating for programmatic, institutional culture, and budgetary changes relative to DoD data, analytics, and AI.  Dr. Martell is championing the Departments’ efforts to increase data sharing in the areas of health records and law-enforcement records, ensuring appropriate consistency with privacy and confidentiality regulations. As CDAO, Dr. Martell has extensive interactions with Departmental, and general awareness of Federal, entities engaged in statistical activities related to data, analytics and AI.     

Prior to joining the DoD, Dr. Martell was Head of Machine Learning for Lyft where he built a state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) Platform, allowing Lyft engineering to quickly build and ship ML models using large-scale, new and ongoing statistical programs. From 2018 – 2020, Dr. Martell was Head of Machine Intelligence at Dropbox, responsible for all machine learning, including overall vision-setting, drawing from analytics as applied to ML, and clear, concise communication across the organization.

Dr. Martell’s proficiency in statistical principles and methodologies has been demonstrated in his several patents including a Hybrid Classification System in 2021 and System and Method for Encrypting Data in Pictorial Data in 2008. He has published several papers anchored in mathematics and statistics including MAJIC: A Java Application for Controlling Multiple Heterogenous Robotic Agents and is also the co-author of the book Great Principles of Computing, published by MIT Press in 2015.

Dr. Martell has been a Senior Advisor, Relevance Science & Engineering at the National Laboratory for Education Transformation since 2016. And from 2003 – 2014, he served as Associate Chairman of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Dr. Martell earned a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.