Kathleen Fisher
Director, Innovation Information Office, DARPA
Kathleen Shanahan Fisher was born in 1969 in San Marino, California. She earned an undergraduate degree in Math and Computer Studies at Stanford University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
She worked at AT&T Labs Research, becoming a principal member of the technical staff. She was a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford. She later became a program manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. Concurrent with her scientific research there, she was also a professor of computer science at Tufts University.
Fisher is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In the News…
Director of the Information Innovation Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Kathleen Fisher, wants to build more resilient AI systems.
“Use cases of AI are pretty much the entirety of DARPA’s mission,“ Director Fisher said. “DARPA’s mission is detecting and creating strategic surprise, so looking over the horizon for opportunities and threats that might be coming and creating technology to take advantage of the opportunities and ward off the threats so that we’re well prepared for what might be coming as a nation.“
She state that the agency is working on the CASTLE program, where a system would be able to counter attack against cyber hackers rather than being taken offline.
Director Fisher said, “The idea behind the CASTLE program is, can we defend this system in a different way? Can we have a cyber agent that can actively defend the system while it’s under attack?”
